“Come take a ride, D.” It’s Rankin.
I jump in back. Nevada drives. He catches my eye in the rearview and smiles, making his gold-capped dog tooth flash. Nevada told me once that his mom gave it to him on his fifteenth birthday as a reward for passing all his classes. If he’d been able to go a year without getting suspended, she would have paid for one on the other side too. He slams us into gear and the Humvee leaps forward, leaving a wake of sprayed sand. The engine whines. Over the iPod-rigged sound system, a man sings his apology to Miss Jackson, explaining he’s for real. Nevada powers us across the base. When we reach the outer wall, he slows down and eases back into patrol speed.
“I’ve been thinking on this, D,” Rankin says, his voice flat and low, serious. “And we got a problem.”
“Ahmed.” Nevada pronounces it like Ah-mad. “Ahmed the A-rab.”
We pass under a perimeter flood and it fills the car with a light as thick and yellow as melted butter. Nevada sings along with the song’s chorus, thumping out the rhythm with his hands. Otherwise he keeps quiet. I lean forward and wait to hear what comes next. The soft light of the instrument panel makes their heads look as shiny and smooth as oiled wood. Just after the bugout, the two of them had shaved off all their hair. Rankin never explained this. I didn’t ask.
“But—” I point my chin at Nevada.
“We need to bring somebody else in. We can’t do this on our own. And besides, it concerns all of us, D. Today it’s you, but tomorrow it could be any of us. Right now, we got to be careful who we tell. I don’t trust the spook, and I don’t trust Oliphant neither. Guzman’s a good guy, but I have a feeling Oliphant has some dirt on him.”
“Like what?” I ask. This is news to me.
“Could be anything. But Guzman sucks up to the man something awful.”
“Makes me sick,” Nevada adds.
“Ever strike you as odd that they don’t argue? Never even seen it happen once. The man don’t disagree with him. Ever.”
“That just ain’t natural,” Nevada says.
“What I’m saying here is we got to be careful. Even someone we trust may be a liability. Somebody like Hazel, say, might slip up and let them know. Not on purpose, just—” He holds out his hands. “Nevada here, now he can keep his lips together.”
“Listen, yo, I can keep a secret. I’ve got practice.” Nevada says all this in a soft voice, as though we could be overheard even here. “This Ahmed shit has grown some serious legs. I been watching this game you and Lopez be playing, D. The man’s an asshole, no doubt, but he’s straight. I don’t believe he’d do this shit he’s doing if he didn’t believe and believe hard. I’ve thought it over.”
“Dyson said something funny to me today. I don’t think he even realized it himself,” Rankin says. “He told me he was talking to Lopez the day you popped him—”
Nevada snickers. “That’s quite a shiner you gave him, D.”
“I couldn’t help it,” I say.
“Well.” Rankin waves this off. “Lopez told Dyson he waited till he was absolutely sure before he made this big fuss about you. But here’s the funny part: he said someone asked him to keep an eye on you. And this was some time back. They been keeping tabs on you a while now. Waiting for something. I don’t like it. It feels all wrong.”
“You mean—”
“Tell him,” Rankin says, grim.
“Somebody’s playing Lopez.” Nevada glances back at me in the rearview.
“Like who?” I ask, already lining up my own answer.
Rankin ignores this. The shadows on his face flicker as we pass beneath the floodlights. “Lopez has got real suction with the El-Tee. That makes him even more dangerous.”
“Who’s the guy that’s playing Lopez?” I ask again.
“Guys,” Rankin says.
“What?” I say.
“Let me go back a bit. I’ve been putting some shit together all day. Shit I didn’t think about at the time, but now it all connects. First, Cox told me he overheard the El-Tee and Lopez talking in the Comm Trailer one night. This was right after the last IED, mind you. He said to Lopez, we need to make a note of everything he does. I want you to think back and make a list of every time you saw him doing it. But Cox doesn’t hear who the him is. At the time, Cox thought they might be talking about him, selling Cassandra whiskey, so he stayed and listened. When Lopez asked why, the El-Tee told him he’d had his suspicions about this person a while now. And not just him. Lieutenant Saunders mentioned it too, he says. Then he asked Lopez to tell him if he saw this guy doing anything. Cox got freaked out and tried to leave and Blankenship saw him, so that’s all he heard. Now you know how Cox is, so this ain’t word for word, but I expect it’s pretty close.”
“Man,” I say, “I always thought it was Lopez who first brought it to the lieutenant.”
“Puts it in a different light, huh?” Rankin says.
“Shit. I don’t know what to think now.” I sit back in the seat.
“I seen Ahmed and Lopez talking a bunch of times,” Nevada says, looking over his shoulder and catching my eye. “How’s it a man’ll trust a hajji over a person? That shit ain’t right.”
“Nevada,” I say, “how much did Rankin tell you about all this? The whole Ahmed thing.”
Rankin nods, says, “Go on,” so I tell Nevada about the hidden door. Why the hell not? I figure. If he’s in, he’s in. And Rankin trusts him. So I go ahead and tell him about what the captured kid said and explain about the old insurgent’s death. I tell him about everything except the green lockbox. That’s a whole different soap opera, best kept on its own separate channel.
“Damn,” he says, squeezing the steering wheel. “I didn’t think about the old man. But you’re right, D. He was just a little guy. No way he could of done himself like that.”
“So what are we going to do?” I ask, sliding down in the vinyl seat until all I can see are the shiny tops of their heads.
They exchange a look.
“We chewed it over some,” Nevada says.
“And we agreed we got to do something real about this Ahmed situation. Get rid of him.” Rankin turns and searches for my eyes in the darkness.
“Kill him?” I ask, not sure how I feel about this, not sure at all.
“How often do people go down under the old fort, Nevada?” Rankin asks. I’m thrown a bit by the subject change. “The part under the garage where we kept the old guy.”
“Only time I ever did was with him.”
Rankin looks at me.
“Never,” I say. “Not before and not since the old guy.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Rankin says. “We snatch Ahmed and bag his head before he gets a look at us and then put him down there in one of them cells. Lock him up tight. Give him some water and a slop bucket. A little food.”
“Seal him up like a bumblebee in a tuna can.” Nevada sings this.
“How long?” I ask.
Rankin shrugs. “Everybody’ll be looking for him. Their guys, our guys. We might just learn a couple things, seeing how people take it.”
“Okay,” I say. I’m impressed. These two have a strategy. They’ve promoted themselves a game plan.
“Give the tree a shake,” Rankin says, flashing me a smile big enough to show all his teeth, “and see what falls out.”
“Or who,” Nevada says.
We pass beneath a floodlight and both of their heads flash like windshields on a sunny day. The Humvee comes back around the gate, and Nevada wheels us through the parade ground. Our conversation took exactly one lap of the base. Just before they drop me at the kitchen tent, a sizzle of orange sparks draws a line across the base. It looks like someone lobbed a burning softball. Before I can even say “Oh, shit,” it hits an empty patch of sand beside the tent Rankin and I share. The Humvee rocks back on its shocks. A spout of sand rises twenty feet. Little stones patter against the roof and hood. I tighten my shoulders and duck. Our tent flips over and flies several feet. It la
nds, wobbles for a moment, hangs there like an enormous box kite, then deflates. Canvas smolders. Something inside burns with a soft, orange flame.
The next tent down looks like it got hit by some shrapnel. The new guy, Howley, tumbles out half-naked and shouting. Blood is spattered across his chest. Rankin is out of the car, running, before I can wrap my head around what’s just happened.
“That’s hard, D,” Nevada says, opening the door and jumping down. “They thumped your crib.”
73
Cox got hit. A piece of metal the size of a molar ripped into his chest and he bled out in minutes, spraying his life on everything around him. Another went in through his eye. He never even woke up. Nevada drove Cox and Howley to the clinic. Rankin sat in back with them. I’m not sure how much of the blood on Howley was his own and how much came from Cox, but he could talk and walk around, all right. The inside of their tent was a dripping mess. I still can’t make myself believe it. Cox and I had eaten together a few hours before. He waited till I finished in the kitchen, so I wouldn’t have to eat alone. We played tabletop football with a folded triangle of paper, the way we used to in junior high. I gave him a lot of shit tonight about his bug collection. I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t just keep my mouth shut. He didn’t need that. He gets it enough from everybody else. Got. I told him he had a head like a grasshopper. With big alien eyes. Jesus. And now the asshole’s dead. Just like that. Dead.
Salis stumbles over, puffy-eyed, red lines from his pillow pressed deep in his cheeks. He and Hazel pour sand on what’s left of the wooden pallet we used as a floor. I can only watch. The two of them manage to save most of our gear, but the tent and all but one of my books are a total loss. I can’t seem to move. If they weren’t here, I would have just stood and stared as it all burned away.
The siren goes off, but it’s a complete afterthought. Everyone’s already out of their tents. Sergeant Oliphant shouts. We jump.
“Listen, asshole, you don’t have the luxury of sitting around feeling sad,” he yells at me. “So move your ass.”
Somebody up in tower four turns on a searchlight and sends a bright dot bouncing along the ridgetops just beyond the base. Once the tent fire is contained, I pull on my battle gear and lock my rifle, but that’s the only rocket-propelled grenade that lands. By now everyone’s wide awake and keyed up. Salis paces back and forth between the tents, shouting “Hooah.” He’s not the only one who feels let down by the lack of action. It’s disappointing not to have a target to fire your weapon at after something like this. I want to kill someone. I would gladly do it with my hands. Salis fires his rifle in the air, probably just getting it out of his system. Sergeant Oliphant screams at him, “Stop acting like a fucking hajji!”
I arrange our salvaged belongings into little stacks. When Rankin gets back from the clinic, he stomps a sort of angry war dance around the piles. His forehead is tight and wrinkled and his uniform is splotched with blood. Occasionally he tells the moon to fuck off. Shouts it up at the sky. I’ve never seen him quite so mad as this. The lieutenant puts Howley in Lopez’s tent. It’s probably not a good idea for him to sleep alone for a while, he says. After Doc Dyson cleaned him up, it turned out he hadn’t been hit at all. All that blood was from Cox. The lieutenant tells me and Rankin he’s sorry we lost our shit and that we can stay in an empty officer’s trailer tonight.
“Shit luck,” the lieutenant says. “A bad business all around.”
“That wasn’t just a lucky hit, sir,” Rankin tells him, pushing his face up just a little too close to the lieutenant’s and speaking just a bit too loudly.
The lieutenant takes it well. He steps back and puts a hand on Rankin’s shoulder. “I know it can seem that way, soldier, but they’re after all of us, not just you.”
“It ain’t me they’re after, sir.” Rankin points to me. “It’s him.”
“They’re happy when they hit any of us. And we’re Goddamned lucky it was just one rocket.”
“Look,” Rankin says, ignoring this completely, “that rocket came in low. We watched it. It came in too low to be from outside.” He traces the route of the rocket with his hand. “Just like this.”
Behind me comes the click, click, click sound of metal on metal. Nevada sits on the bumper of the Humvee and snaps bullets into a spare magazine for his rifle. His movements are steady and unhurried, but his jaw is set, his eyes flat and mean. When he’s finished, Nevada nods at me and walks off.
“That’s impossible,” Lieutenant Blankenship says.
“No, sir, it isn’t.” Rankin points toward the south wall again. “I know you don’t believe it, but there has to be a door in the wall. There’s no other way this could happen. The same door they used when they blew up the Humvees. We got to do something about it, sir. Or it’ll happen again.”
“If there’s a door, Rankin,” the lieutenant says, his voice sharper now, “why didn’t they just rush in tonight and take the whole base?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“If they made a well-coordinated night attack, they could get us all in twenty minutes.” He snaps his fingers. “Like that.”
“Maybe they’re waiting, sir.” Rankin’s face is expressionless and his voice is even, but his eyes scream fuck you. “For the right moment.”
As the lieutenant walks off, I shake out a ready-made from a pack Salis gave me after we put out the fire and ask Rankin if he really thinks tonight’s RPG came from inside the wire.
“Sure as sure.” He sucks down the cigarette as though he’ll suffocate without it. “No other way. Had to be.”
“Ahmed?” I light my cigarette and cough immediately. How long has Salis been saving these? They taste like sawdust.
“Or one of his pals who came in through the door. Probably that. But it had to be Ahmed who told him where to point the fucking thing. It ain’t a coincidence it hit our tent. I know it. You know it. We got to move on this, D. Now. If the El-Tee won’t do it, we got to make good on this ourselves.”
“Want me to go get Nevada?” I ask him.
“I’d say tonight, but it’s past that now. Too late. And what I’ve got in mind won’t work during the day. I got a nasty feeling, D. Something bad’s coming down. You take us to that door tomorrow and the three of us’ll stake it out from dusk on. Catch him coming or going, one.”
“Check,” I say.
“Something bad’s coming down,” Rankin says again, flicking his cigarette onto the remains of our tent. It draws a bright orange arc in the dark air. “Every now and then I get a whiff of it. Smells like rotten fish.”
74
Tap, tap, tap. I look up from the dishes I’m scrubbing with a ragged puck of steel wool. Tap, tap, tap. What the hell is that? Foss is out front busing dishes. I spin around. The captain stands in the back doorway, the one we keep open for the breeze that never comes. There’s no need to use an oven back here: the kitchen is the oven. The captain shakes up a smoke from a brand-new pack and points outside with his chin. I follow. A knot of dread ties up my intestines. The cellophane wrapper from his cigarettes flits past my face, caressing me on the cheek as it goes by.
“Sorry about your tent, bud. Tough luck. And your pal.”
“Right,” I say, “luck.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. The secret door. You didn’t really expect Blankenship to believe that, did you? And marking it with a cigarette butt?” He clucks his tongue at me like a kindergarten teacher. “Even if it was true, that’s pretty half-assed, to say the least. And to think I was considering you for Intel training.”
There’s nothing to say to this.
“I hope you didn’t lose our little item when the hand grenade hit. Those boxes are pretty solid, but I don’t think it’d survive a direct hit.”
“Rocket-propelled grenade, sir.”
“Whatever,” he says, exhaling smoke with his words. “So?”
“What are you talking about, sir?”
“Don’t be dense, Private. The lockbox you lo
cated for me.” He laughs quietly, almost to himself. “The lieutenant’s just about shit himself with worry. He’s accused me of taking it ten times now.”
“You did, sir.”
“No, Private.” He points his cigarette at me. “You did. And you’ll do well to remember that, especially the way things stand vis-à-vis you and Blanky. Now tell me what happened after that grenade hit.”
“I didn’t keep the box in my tent, sir. I told you. So when the rocket hit, it was somewhere else, safe.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good. That’s very fucking good.” He digs a hole in the sand with the toe of his boot and spits into it. “If it’s not in your burned-up tent, then where the hell is it? Because I’ve checked. It’s not where you said it would be. I hope for your sake you’ve—”
“I moved it.”
The afternoon sun is low in the sky. A small breeze ruffles the legs of my fatigues and makes the long purple shadow of the mess tent shudder. I shade my eyes and look around. Rankin should be here soon, and I’m hoping the captain will finish this quickly.
“Well, how about you take me out to the new spot now?” He kicks sand into his spit hole and looks over at me. “A helicopter is coming in sometime tomorrow or the next day, depending on the weather, to take me back to HQ. The box is coming with me. I’ll risk it from here on.”
I take him out to the small grove of date palms that grow in a muddy seep behind the ruined old fort. Baba told me once that this was a true oasis, the main reason the fort was built here in the first place, but the spring has clogged with sand after years of neglect. No one cares about it any longer. And soon it will be hidden again. It is the only natural shade on the base. Six trees grow in a circle around a muddy puddle. They arch slightly to the west, like unstrung bows. The tree furthest from the spring appears to have died. Its dry branches rattle like insect wings when the wind blows. Dead fronds crunch beneath our boots. I spot the bleach bottle and stop.
The Sandbox Page 23