News From the Red Desert Read Free

narrowed his eyes. He wondered how long it would take to climb it. His dog sensed that thought and groaned. The lieutenant figured the dog was hungry.

    A hundred metres behind them, Deirdre O’Malley watched the two men and the dog closely. She had only gotten her press credentials two weeks earlier and had been in KAF for a few days. She had not filed a story yet and was getting heat from her boss, who reminded her daily that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She kept asking the press liaison officers about combat ops, about local resistance—their replies were nebulous on those subjects, but they told her they did have a great story about a set of triplet airframe techs who were all posted to the base. Uplifting. Good for morale.
    What interested her was this emaciated Brit. She had heard he walked in from Iran. Apparently he had his own book in mind and wasn’tinclined to give his story away—half a dozen of the guys in the press tent had already approached him. It was understandable, on one level, if that’s what he was—adventurer writer idiot guy—but that didn’t mesh with anything else: his access to the base, his fluency in Dari. His survival. The fact that he hadn’t been picked up by a patrol and shoved into a sack.

    Master Sergeant Demetrios Anakopoulus had been in Kandahar for two months and the supply point he operated had become the hub of the whole base. He watched his men arrange the crates of materiel as they came off the transports. In here somewhere were pallets of steel framing with which he was to construct a warehouse to keep the rain off the rest of the crates. Warehouses, actually. The field of crates stretched nearly the ten thousand feet of the airstrip. Rifle ammunition. Surgical instruments. Field rations. Bottled water. Uniforms. Boots. Pool tables. Weight machines. Treadmills. Canvas tents. Sunscreen. Computers. Radios. Ten thousand different field manuals. Bread ovens. Telephone poles. Anakopoulus surveyed it all and felt a kind of pride. He liked belonging to an organization capable of bringing the makings of a small city from twelve time zones away in a week. You could preserve civilization with just what he had here. Like logisticians anywhere, he thought of the pallets as his property; he had signed for them, and was responsible for them all. Maybe fifty million dollars’ worth of stuff. Maybe more. Until all this was distributed, he had the most important job on the base. Not that anyone would actually say that. But it was the case. You could tell from the number of times his boss and his boss’s boss called him every day. His bosses could use a bit of calmness. Anakopoulus was due to retire in a year and he knew what he was doing; he just wanted to be left alone to do his job.
    This would probably be his last deployment. By the usual rules, it would have gone to someone more junior than him. But these were not usual times. Still, it was kind of great, seeing what the machine wascapable of when it got wound up. When it stopped being just a hypothesis. His satphone rang. No one else he knew of had their own satphone except the commander. It rang again.
    “Sergeant Major Anakopoulus!” he barked, expecting it to be the waste-of-rations major who thought he had some sort of charge over him.
    “Demetrios?”
    “Susie?”
    “I’m sorry for calling your satphone.”
    “That’s okay. Is anything wrong?”
    “No. I just hadn’t heard from you and I was looking at the calendar and wondering—do you think we should still plan on going to Puerto Rico next Christmas?”
    “That can wait. We’ll do it when I get home.”
    “Okay. It’s just that the fares go up the later you book the tickets.”
    “I know.”
    “I’m really missing you already.”
    “I can’t talk too long here, Susie. I’m in the middle of something.”
    “I know. I just wanted to know what to do about the tickets.”
    “How’s the kid?”
    “He’s great. I’ll let you go now. I know