Richard House - The Kills

Watts salutes the air.

Goodbye, Southern-CIPA.

Hello, Camp Crapper.

* * *

The convoy gathered at the Transport dock.

Rem hadn’t met the men as a group before. Santo, Watts, Pakosta, Samuels, Clark, Chimeno, Kiprowski. Six of the seven picked from Fatboy’s list, seconded from their units and placements. Kiprowski added as a late concession. He rode Jalla, Death Row, on a push bike. Kiprowski, by rights, should be a legend already.

Clark held court as they waited. ‘This is all good news,’ he said, ‘they’re shutting down projects, moving people on. This is the last, last chance.’ Clark believed, as did many others, that the section base would soon be closed. ‘The commissary,’ he asked Kiprowski, ‘they’ve cut down on supplies? Am I right? Same with stores. It’s happening. You know it is. The TCNs have their exit papers. The convoys are going directly to the camps. It’s over. The only thing remaining in Amrah is Southern-CIPA because that’s where the money is.’

Rem walked from vehicle to vehicle, shook hands, gave his name and repeated theirs.

* * *

Rem took the first Humvee behind the lead and picked Watts and Santo for company. Pakosta, Clark, and Samuels would follow, with Kiprowski and Chimeno coming after with most of the supplies. Behind them a long train of trucks, gun muzzles spiked out of windows. For the first leg they would accompany the convoy on the southward route to Kuwait then separate before the border and make their own way west. As promised Geezler had arranged security for the final stretch, two Cougars, front and back. Pakosta had experience in recovery along Highway 80, and advised that they should keep the spacing between them uneven. Rem couldn’t see how this could be achieved. The map showed nothing west of Highway 80, simply lines indicating the grades of hills and berms, the lengths of dry windswept ditches. No villages, no installations, no pre- or post- war encampments. Nothing until Camp Liberty. A map so blank it might as well be an ocean chart.

‘Doesn’t mean nothing’s there,’ Watts advised. ‘It just means they don’t know.’

Clark’s smile slipped off his face.

Watts slapped his shoulder. ‘If they take anyone out it’s usually the second vehicle. The first pops the mechanism, the second takes the hit, after that they’ll take anyone in their sights and the whole convoy lights up.’

Clark began to buckle his jacket. ‘Much better,’ he spoke to himself. ‘Thanks. Feeling so much better.’

‘I told you what you say if they capture you.’ Santo drew his finger across his throat. ‘Remember. No one loves us. No one’s paying any ransom. We won’t be missed.’

Pakosta standing on the running plate kept up a slow solo jive and paused every now and then to mime being shot in the head, the heart, the crotch.

* * *

An hour out of Amrah City and the palms and the villages thinned out and knuckled into the slopes — primitive, Santo called them, pointing as he drove, so that Rem couldn’t be sure if he meant the place or the people. In many ways the villages appeared as tight as the old centre of Halsteren. You’d hear your neighbours, every detail, and you’d know them well. A few of the houses sported satellite discs and long aerials. Santo pointed them out. ‘If you want to fuck with someone, you go right to that house.’

Rem looked back at the line of trucks, Kiprowski’s head struck out of the second-to-last Humvee.

‘You see that?’

Santo turned in his seat and took a while to find what Rem was talking about. ‘Is that boy a retard?’

‘Thinks he’s on vacation.’

Rem called on the radio and asked Kiprowski to draw his head back inside the vehicle. Kiprowski gave a wave as he complied.

Santo tutted. ‘Certified.’

Beyond the groves and villages the land tired itself out, the bluffs and hills became distant, and the sky bifurcated, blue up top and a dirty skin-like pink along the horizon. Not a desert in the way Rem thought of deserts — as something tide-like, the wind working sand into ripples and banks — but instead a scabby gritty wasteland, hammered, used up, not a place of possibility, but a place with an over-busy history. Knackered. After a while they swapped drivers: Watts day-dreamed and Rem drove and Santo chattered to himself.

Rem focused so hard on the vehicle in front that the rough tarpaulin of the square back appeared to float, a soft fluttering box set at a fixed distance. He needed to thank Geezler and couldn’t decide the most appropriate method, then figured that saying nothing would be fine. People have their own reasons for helping you out, and in satisfying his own agenda Geezler probably didn’t realize the extent of the favour anyhow: eight men transferred to safety and security. For the first time he began to think seriously about re-establishing his business.

Santo asked Watts why he was here, and Watts explained about his wife and expected child. ‘I get back when it’s done. No point being there until it needs paying for.’

Santo looked to Rem and began to tell Watts about Matt Cavanaugh. ‘The guy who walked across the highway. You heard about this? The walker. The guy in the news?’ He cocked his thumb at Rem. ‘That’s his friend.’

‘I saw that. Why would a person do that?’

‘I had a business.’ Rem cleared his throat. ‘House painting. He worked for me, and he helped himself to a few things while we were at some of the houses. He didn’t take much. A ring, some watches. The watches were part of a collection. Just enough to cause trouble.’

Watts and Santo shook their heads. ‘You knew this man? A friend, you say?’ Then after a respectable pause: ‘So, how come he ended up walking across a highway?’

‘Details,’ Santo urged. ‘Details.’

Now Rem shook his head. ‘I don’t know much more. It happened while I was here. Maybe the question is why didn’t he do it sooner?’

‘You ever done anything stupid? I mean really stupid?’ Santo blew his nose into his hand. ‘Look, I’m still bleeding.’ He shook his hand out of the window and the gesture came as a shock to them, an invitation for trouble, a signal deserving a shot, an ambush.

‘As in, coming here?’

‘I mean stupid stupid. Animal stupid.’

‘Sober or what?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I mean insane.’

Rem watched the vehicle in front, teased forward, played with the space between them. ‘I stole a dog.’

Santo sucked air between his teeth in dismissal. ‘OK. Close. Like a prank? A joke, right? When you were a kid?’

‘Just before I came to Iraq.’

Both Watts and Santo laughed. ‘You did what?’

‘It’s complicated. I had a dog. A Staffordshire bull terrier. He went missing. I came home one time and he was gone. Doors were open and the dog was gone.’ Rem asked Santo to open a can for him. Red Bull was making him sick and he wanted something less sticky. ‘I thought I had a good idea who was responsible. So I went to that person’s house and I stole their dog.’

‘You got yours back?’

‘They didn’t have it. In fact, I doubt it had anything to do with them.’

‘But you have this other dog, right?’

‘I did. It was one of those small dogs. I took it back once I realized what I was doing. Sometimes these things seem like a good idea.’

‘You should have eaten it,’ Santo deadpanned.

‘You have issues. You know that?’

‘I have issues? I’m not the person who kidnapped a dog. Kidnapping is a felony, man or beast. Seven to nine.’

‘So why are you here?’ Watts asked Santo.

‘Because, Paul, is it Paul? I’m here to put the f in freedom.’

* * *

An hour after they’d separated from the convoy the road stopped. Rem woke to find nothing but rock and sand ahead of them. A blank field of sun-split stone that rose and ended in a haze.