The Sandbox (30 page)

I hadn’t, but I remember Rankin doing some. Suddenly, a few more things make sense. At the time, none of the guys could figure out why the hell we were protecting a shell of a factory. After a month, we stopped. One day it’s important, the next day it’s not. We forgot about the place in a week. In the Army, this kind of random shit happens all the time.

“But there’s still some money there,” I say, pulling out my crumpled portrait of Ben. “I found dozens of these.”

He snatches it out of my hand and holds it up to the light. “Shit. It’s got the Coalition stamp. It’s real. So those two were holding back a little for themselves. Where—”

Above us, a mortar lands somewhere close. The light in the hall becomes dim, goes out and returns.

“Why did you cut it up?” he asks.

“One of the local children tore out the heads,” I say.

“Maybe the child you’ve been blabbing on about. That was stupid, by the way. Did you find any whole bills?”

“I didn’t have time, but they must be there.” I’m not sure why I tell him this. Maybe so he’ll fuck with the lieutenant. Or worse, some perverse part of me wants to impress him.

“It certainly bears looking into.” He studies the head a moment longer and then crumples it into a pellet and throws it at me. It bounces off of my cheek and onto my lap. I slip it back into my pocket. The two of us sit in silence for a spell.

“So,” I say, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they only left a few bills by mistake.”

“No,” he says, thinking hard, but not about this. “I’ll bet there’s still a small stash.”

“So?” I say. “What happened to the rest of it?”

The captain can’t help himself. This story of someone else’s fuckup is too good to keep to himself. He tells me the lieutenant started having the same worries the general did: someone’s going to find it and blab. Soldiers are like little boys—when they’re bored, they poke around and get themselves into trouble. There’s nothing to it but for him and the old sarge to go bury it out in the desert. Four or five night drops.

“They did it by themselves?” I ask. This is starting to smack of coulda-woulda. I get a whiff of something stale.

“I don’t fucking know,” he says. “The second big mistake the general made, and this, this I really—” Whatever it is, it cracks him up something fierce. He takes out his handkerchief and wipes his face. When he’s finished, he looks over at me with a wet-lipped smirk.

He tells me the joke. The general let someone take pictures of the cash hand-overs. With the camera on their cell phone. Pictures of smiling officers and sheikhs. Even the Goddamned ambassador. The captain thinks that maybe the general didn’t see it happening at the time, but he sure as hell knew about those photos later. Then, instead of making the smart move and destroying the phone and all the prints, he keeps them. Probably thought he could use it as political capital later on. The captain says the ambassador is famous for being slow-witted, but he pulls a lot of weight back in Washington, and apparently the general has a few political ambitions of his own. Most of this was an open secret. The turning point came when the captain found the cell phone.

“But we didn’t know where the money was. No one did. It took a little work, but Saunders and I found it.” Again the ugly smile.

“How?”

The captain shakes his head. “If you make it into Intel, maybe I’ll show you a few tricks. A little of the famous razzle-dazzle.”

“Thanks,” I say.

He keeps on talking. It’s almost as though he can’t help himself. He has to tell the rest of the story. When you are the keeper of so many secrets, it must be a pleasure of sorts to disclose a few—or just simply a relief to unload them onto someone else.

He and Saunders knew where the base was, but not the actual cash dump. It took a little finagling and some forging of documents, but after a while he managed to get Saunders posted out here. Saunders brought the phone and a few prints with him, but the photos were all backed up on a computer somewhere else. Here their game got tricky. Saunders had to move carefully. The captain wouldn’t go into the dirty details, but somehow Saunders got Lieutenant Blankenship to agree to give him grid numbers for the drop sites in exchange for the phone and the prints. This was the real reason we’d been going to Inmar that day. Saunders had planned a meet with the captain in Inmar because Lieutenant Blankenship, who was working with Sarge for the general, believed the captain was the one who had the photos. And that’s where he told Lieutenant Blankenship he’d hand them over.

“And, well, you don’t need to know the rest.” He snorts. “Suffice it to say, your lieutenant, he bought it. Swallowed the whole salty load. And he agreed to give us the details and a map. He showed Saunders the map, but he wouldn’t give him the GPS numbers until he had the photos and phone in hand. And now I find out the crafty little bastard was holding out on us. Well, believe me, he won’t for long.”

The captain stretches and moves around the room. He kicks the wall. Mildewed chunks of concrete break away and drop to the floor. “And then, imagine this. On the way to Inmar, there just happens to be an IED attack.”

The captain studies my face, waiting for me to get the picture. Whatever he sees must satisfy him, because he smiles again. His teeth look wet and sticky.

“Shit,” I say, genuinely shocked, “you don’t really think he
planned
it. I mean, how, sir? I interviewed the prisoners.”

“Yeah,” he says, “and what did they tell you?”

I must look completely dumbfounded. He smirks at me like I’m a complete and utter dumbass. And maybe I am.

“Exactly,” he says. “I bet they told you the story about their long tribal battle with the Gashtus, right? Well, guess what? Their tribe, the Furdus, just happens to be one of the few friendly groups that
didn’t
go sour on us.”

Something else becomes clear to me. Something awful. Something else awful.

I speak too quickly, before I really think it all the way through. “But weren’t the prisoners killed by Ahmed?”

“Oh, right.” He rolls his eyes. “
Sure
they were.”

“The hinges on the cell were taken off. Why would the lieutenant do that if he had the key?”

The reason is so obvious he just waits for it to come to me.

“Why do you think he chose you to interrogate them? Why didn’t he do it himself? Do you really believe you’re the one on this base most qualified to conduct interrogations? He needed a fucking patsy, someone just smart enough to notice things like scratched hinges.” The captain takes two brisk steps across the room, so he can jab me in the sternum. “You. He had to make a report. He had to make it look good. If you talked with them, he wouldn’t leave his fingerprints. And then, once he thought you were getting too close to the money, he found a way to put you down here. Just before that kangaroo court the other day, he told me he suspected
you
of killing the prisoners. Pretty neat backup plan, huh? I was impressed. But that was back when he still had the phone and the photos.”

“No one will believe that, sir.” I’m speaking too quickly, my voice shrill. “There’s no proof to—”

“When you tell them your sad little story during the court-martial,” he says, not unkindly, “tell me, who do
you
think they’re going to believe?”

I take a breath. And then another. I need to calm the fuck down. “I don’t know, sir. This all sounds too crazy. I can’t believe the lieutenant would sacrifice soldiers. Two soldiers. The prisoners, maybe, but I mean, come on—”

The captain looks at me like I’m pitiful, a rube. “Expendable.”

“Oh.” It’s the only sound I can manage to get out.

“It’s all piss under the bridge now. Forget about it.”

Right.

“How much of that story is true, sir?” I ask him.

“Oh.” He taps his chin with a knuckle. “Say, about ninety-five percent.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Sir,” he says, cuffing me on the head.

“Sir,” I say.

“It means take it or leave it. You wanted to know. And now you do. Like I said before, knowledge is guilt in this game. You’re in it with the rest of us now.” He lights another cigarette. This time he gives me one. “Talk to Lopez. That’s the only thing that can save you. All that matters now is that we get the shit back.”

We,
he says. Sure. I must look pretty stupid.

“I can do it more quickly if you get me out of here.”

“Listen, Durrant. You do this for me, and I’ll arrange it so the charges are dropped and you’re out of here by morning. I’ll figure out what to do with you when I get to Inmar. Get the stuff and I’ll make sure your records are cleansed. We’ll take the same chopper out of this dump.”

I imagine a quick shove out of the helicopter door and the long fall to the desert below. I see now how deep I’m into this. I’ll be lucky to come out of it with my head still attached.

“I want you to have some alone time. To think. You’re not out of the soup yet, and without my help you’ll drown in it.”

The captain raps twice on the cell door.

“Where are you going now, sir?”

“To have a frank discussion with your lieutenant.”

Rankin holds up a finger behind the captain’s back and mouths the word, “Wait,” before he closes the door. I don’t know whether to believe all of the captain’s story, part, or none. Ninety-five percent, my ass. It sounds too clever by half. Nothing that happens in this war adds up quite so neatly. I walk back and forth. From one wall to the other. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. The numbers add up to the same sum every time. Nothing else in this place does.

88

After the captain
leaves, Rankin comes to the doorway to talk with me.

“Lieutenant’s sending a team out to blow the factory in the morning.” Even as Rankin tells me this, I can see him starting to regret it. A narrow-eyed cautiousness.

“What?” I shout.

“Damn, man. There ain’t nothing you can do.” He holds out his palms as if to stop me from moving, even though I’m sitting on the cot. “You’ve done enough, D.”

“Why are they doing it?” I pick at a loose string in the cot’s fabric. When I tug on it, a line of green thread pulls away from one end to the other and then back again. If I sat and did this long enough, the whole cot would come apart in my hands. A big pile of olive-colored string. A big pile of nothing.

“Lopez has him thinking there’s insurgents holed up in there.” Rankin puts his hands on either side of the doorjamb and leans into the cell, but he’s yet to take a step inside.

“But Lopez told me he doesn’t believe that any more.”

Rankin gives me a skeptical look. “He said exactly that?”

“Well, not exactly
that
, but close enough. We had a heart-to-heart.”

“I heard. Heartwarming.”

“You listen in?”

“I might of heard a word or two.”

“Or a number or two?”

Rankin smiles.

“You get those GPS numbers?”

Rankin keeps on smiling, but now maybe a touch wider. He taps his head.

I know he knows what I’m thinking. It’s there on his face. Why can’t we take the money instead? Why let them have it?

“No,” he says, his smile becoming wary now.

“Why not?”

“Aw, shit, man,” he says. “There ain’t no way we could get that money back to the States with us, even if we did get it before they did.”

He drums the very top of his skull with three fingers like he’s fingering a trumpet.

“It sure would be nice, though,” Rankin says, probably imagining everything he could do with money like that. From the expression on his face, it looks like he can think of quite a few things.

“We could open up a Bubba shrimp franchise,” I say. “I hear they do really well in the malls.”

“Bubba shrimp. Shit.” He moves his chin from side to side very slowly. “Your ass is locked up anyway, D. You can’t be serious.”

“Listen, Rankin—”

He sees something he doesn’t like in my expression. Somehow he always knows which direction my thoughts are moving before I do.

“Oh, no,” he says, before I can spit out the rest, “I know where you’re going with this, and—”

“No, wait, hear me out.”

“You are joking.” He looks at me and tries to decide. The shit of it is, I’m not too sure myself. “I really hope you’re joking.”

“I can’t let that kid die.” About this, I’m absolutely sure.

“I believe you said that the last time. I believed you last time and now I really, truly, believe you. See, the problem is that my ass is on the line here too.”

“The last time we didn’t know about fifty million dollars sitting under a truck tire in the desert.”

“No, more like thirty-three and a half million. Split between three different spots.”

“Damn, you do have good ears.”

“I can’t do it, D. Something bad’s going to happen. I can feel it.”

“Yeah, well, something awful’s going to happen if I don’t. A dead kid.”

“Oh, man, D. There ain’t no fucking kid and you know it. You tried to show me, remember? All I saw was some joke teeth.” Rankin turns his hand into chattering joke teeth, tapping the heel of his palm with his fingers. His pink-nubbed pinkie wiggles like a little tongue.

“Rankin, please, I’m begging you.” I get down on my knees and clasp my hands together.

“I ain’t listening to any more of this bullshit.”

“Come on, Rankin, come on.”

Rankin shuts the door. I can’t say that I blame him. I shouldn’t. But damn if I don’t.

89

I don’t sleep.

90

A door slams.
Someone shouts. But at first when I hear Rankin’s voice, I think he’s talking to me through the Judas hole. Then I hear the second voice. It’s high-pitched and breathless.

“I have to, Rankin. It’s important.” Lopez is back.

“You already seen him, man. Once is enough. They find you down here, they’re going to throw both our asses in these cells. You already wound his chain up. Leave him be.” His voice moves closer, as though he’s physically blocking the door to my cell.

What comes next is confusing. Another voice yells from the far end of the hallway. The echoes make it impossible to understand the words or recognize the voice. Lopez and Rankin shout back at the same time. There’s a brief silence. And then a rifle locks.

“I don’t have it,” Lopez shouts. “I gave it to him last night. It’s too late.”

“Put that thing away, sir,” Rankin says, his voice tight and tense. “There ain’t no call for that.”

I press myself against the door and listen. I hold my breath.

The first gunshot is so loud, the door rattles in its frame. My ears ring. Two three-burst shots follow that are even louder. Boots pound the floor. Another shout. Another gunshot. A cry of pain. Just outside the door, Lopez mutters. His voice is very low and guttural, and he speaks so quickly that the words run together.

“Rankin!” I shout. “What the hell is going on?”

Footsteps move away and return. The door opens. Outside, the hallway is completely black. I step back and instinctively look for cover. There’s nothing. The light from my cell cuts away a slice of the darkness. Just enough to make out a figure.

“Rankin?” I say, clenching my fists.

The figure makes a choking sound and steps forward. It’s Lopez. There is a bright red mark on his chin the size and shape of a strawberry. His good eye is wide and its iris is rimmed with white. He glances quickly over his shoulder, then steps closer. The spot on his chin is a perfect bloody thumbprint.

“What—” I start to ask even before I know the question.

“He shot him.” Lopez grinds his teeth and makes a strange, high-pitched humming sound.

“The lieutenant? Rankin? What are you talking about?”

“The captain.”

“But I don’t—”

“The captain killed him.” He speaks faster now. His words tumble over each other. My ears still buzz and it’s hard to understand him. “I came back to tell you I would do it. I would take the stuff to Inmar. I didn’t know he was following me. I swear it. I didn’t know. Rankin didn’t want to let me in, and then the captain came and—”

“Rankin is dead?” One part of me stays and asks Lopez this question, and another floats up and watches from the ceiling of the cell. My hands go numb and my right leg starts to shake and spasm. I try and hold it still with my useless hands. It is right then that I stop believing in the world, the same way I stopped believing in God when I was seven. The morning after my parents’ funeral when I woke up in my grandpa’s house. Bright white light and the rumble of his voice: “You’ll be staying with me now, Toby.”

Lopez nods.

I have to hold it together. I have to hold it together.

“Are you sure, Lopez? Are you sure?”

He glances over his shoulder into the dark hallway and then back again at me, clicking his rifle’s safety on and off, on and off.

“Where’s the captain?”

“I don’t know. He just—” He makes an odd little gesture with his hands, as though trying to form a shadow puppet. “—ran away. I think I hit him once. At least once. Maybe twice. Then the light went out. I heard him running.” He points to the ceiling. “Up.”

“All right, all right.” I take a deep breath and let it out. “We got to go. You and me. We’ll both go to Inmar.”

“But what about. . . .” He grimaces.

“None of that matters any more. If we stay here, we’re both dead.”

Lopez looks down at his rifle. “I shot an officer. I, I. . . .” His voice wanders off and his eyes lose focus. He goes blank.

I snap my fingers. “Lopez, Lopez, stick with me here. We don’t have time for this kind of shit now. Pack it away. Think about it later. Come on.”

“Uh.” This is all he can get out.

I grab Lopez by the sleeve and pull him into the hall. He follows without resisting. Before I take three steps, I stumble into something. I kneel, my leg pressing against Rankin’s side. Immediately, blood soaks through my pants. I feel for his neck. He’s still warm, but his heart has stopped. Even if it weren’t dark, I wouldn’t be able to see. My eyes burn and blear. A tear drips off my chin. Fucking Rankin. I’m sorry I got you into this shit. You must be so pissed off at me right now. Rankin.

“How will we get away?” Lopez asks. His voice sounds tiny in the darkness, but it brings me back to the here-and-now. “The keys for the Humvees are locked away, and—”

“Are they still firing mortars?” I stand and thumb away the moisture from my eyes. “Are we still fighting?”

“No,” Lopez says, “it all stopped a couple of hours ago. I left my post at the sentry gate to come here.”

“Who else was there with you?” I’m thinking as fast as I can.

“I replaced Howley. It’s just that other new guy, uh, what’s his name? McCrae, I think.”

“Perfect,” I say. “Come on.”

“But what about—”

“Trust me,” I say.

I feel around in the darkness for Rankin’s rifle. It’s wet and tacky. Lopez and I bump heads as I stand. Purple stars whiz through darkness. I grab his sleeve and pull him behind me down the hall. On the second step of the stairway, I slip on something wet, and I fall. It smells like rusty nails. Lopez stops. He won’t move even when I yank on his shirt.

“Trust me,” I say again. “There’s no other way.”

Lopez doesn’t answer, but he moves when I pull.