News From the Red Desert Read Free Page B

She looked away. She looked back at him. She tried to speak but her throat closed up. He tried, too, but he couldn’t make sounds. They just sat there, listening to the bugs.

CHAPTER TWO
    Kandahar Airfield, April 2007
    O f course they did not recognize one another. After five years, they’d hardly have been recognizable to their close friends back home, if they’d still had any. Anyway, even if they had remembered meeting, it probably wouldn’t have helped. Deirdre O’Malley would still be the fucking embed who lost her fucking
body armour
somehow and came to Master Sergeant Anakopoulus’s warehouse demanding a replacement from him an hour before she was supposed to head outside the wire.
    “I didn’t lose it. It was with my kit, but none of it arrived from Baghdad.” Of course she dropped the “Baghdad” in there just as soon as she could. Her gold-rimmed aviators stayed on her face, even inside. “The fighting was heavy when I left and the airfield was mortared. Maybe that’s why.” She paused. The supply clerk looked at her for a long moment and chewed on a toothpick, then he called Anakopoulus out of his office to see what he would say.
    Anakopoulus had been listening to the exchange between O’Malley and his clerk through his open office door, and had been getting angrier by the second. He was entirely uninterested in the posturings of this woman, who must have been in high school when he first set up the KAF supply depot. By now he had seen everything, or everything thatmattered: the quiet two years that followed Taliban’s Last Stand, the slow-to-boil insurgency that began after the fall of Baghdad, and the Iraqization of the country underway now. He had seen journalists come through here in a steady stream, incontinent with excitement over being part of the mission. The supply techs saw everyone in their first intoxicating hours on the base and learned to recognize the giddiness of civilians encountering war for the first time. In an environment with limited distractions, one took one’s fun where it was found.
    The veteran journalists travelled lighter and were usually more careful with the tone they used with clerks and techs. They clung to their sunglasses like Homeland Security agents and they walked faster, looked at less and saw more. They’d picked up some phrases in Pashto and Dari. They were dirtier. Anakopoulus was able to date the embeds like a curator looking at a pot. He figured this one had been among soldiers for a two or three years. But there was an uneasiness folded into her assertiveness that suggested KAF did not quite feel like home to her yet. In a few months, after she had been through the supply warehouses a few times, she would present herself with genial weariness, a much more effective strategy.
    “You’re responsible for your own kit, ma’am,” Anakopoulus said with the obdurate detachment of irritated clerks anywhere.
    “I didn’t lose my kit. I put it on the runway beside the Herc and it didn’t come off.”
    “Maybe take that up with the Air Force.”
    “I have to go on patrol in an hour.”
    That was a mistake and he saw that she knew it as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Journalists loved to affiliate themselves with soldiers, but nothing earned the soldiers’ disdain more quickly than that presumption of equivalency.
She
was not going on patrol.
    “Maybe ask at the press tent. I could give you directions,” he said.
    She did not reply. They looked at one another levelly.
    She knew these first few encounters would influence the way she was seen for the rest of the time she was on base. She could not lose this, notthis badly. Looking Anakopoulus in the eye, she picked up her cell phone. She dialled a number. “Major Horner? Deirdre O’Malley. Yes, I got in this morning. I need some help. My kit didn’t arrive with me and that patrol you set up leaves soon. I need some body armour. I’m here at the supply depot, talking to…” She looked