The Spoils of War. Gordon Kent

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      “Wonderful.”

      She held the cigarette at her side, away from him. “I had a nice husband for a while. Then I scared him off. Two kids. One’s a wifey in London; one’s a doctor in bet-Elan.” She blew out smoke. “Actually I threw my husband out. He started playing around.” She looked aside at him. “I’m embarrassing you.”

      “I don’t embarrass that easy.”

      She patted his arm. “We’ll get along.” She got on the phone again.

      Alan stood on a little hill, looking down at the entrance to the bunker, thinking of the dead man inside. Tortured, beaten to death. It turned his stomach. It always did.

       He and a master chief named Fidelio, whom everybody called Fidel, had been in northern Afghanistan before the bombing began. He had had half a million dollars in US cash, but he was there because Fidel spoke Farsi and Pashto and they needed an officer to go with him. They were in the western part of the Alliance territory buying help for the US attack that was yet to come. As it happened, the warlord they had been sent to spoke Turkmen, so they needed somebody local to translate the Turkmen into Farsi so that Fidel could translate it into English for Alan. They were sitting in a stone house in a room hung with carpets and carpeted under them, sitting cross-legged, tea and food in front of them. Outside, it sounded as if somebody was beating a rug, except that there were screams. Alan had put a quarter of a million US in a pile next to the food, and the general said, “How many men will the US send?” The screaming went on, and the thumping, and Alan frowned at Fidel and then at the sound, and the general muttered something and an aide left the room and the thumping and the screaming stopped. Then they made the deal. The general and his army would fight for the US, and he expected weapons and trucks and petrol and some heavy weapons. Alan said through the chain of interpreters that the quarter-million dollars was for those things, and the general sighed and said back through the chain that his expenses were very high. Most of his money, Alan thought, came from Iran; his men had Iranian weapons and Iranian uniforms, and there were men wandering around speaking Farsi, according to Fidel, who were probably Iranian intel. Still, none of that mattered; his job right then was to get the general to say yes, and they’d worry about Iran later. The general had said yes; Alan said yes. The general and Alan and Fidel all shook hands and smiled a lot and the pile of money disappeared, and when they went outside, there was a bloody body on the ground, and a frightened man was being made to look at it and some soldiers started to shout at him and push him around. He was next.

      Thinking of it, Alan wanted a cigarette, and he might have asked her for one, but Miriam said, “You and I are going, darling,” and he didn’t want to push the intimacy of her “darling” by sharing one of her cigarettes.

      “So soon?”

      She laughed and told him to be nice. “I’ll drive you back, start the paperwork, come back here. It’s my case now.”

      “And you’ll inform me.”

      “I will, of course I will—” She was leading the way toward the gate. Alan asked if Mosher would get into trouble and she said she supposed he would. “But nothing serious. I think he really didn’t know.”

      “It isn’t much of a job.”

      “He made a mess once; he’s only waiting here to get out.”

      An SUV was slanted into one of the parking spaces by the gate, but he barely noted it. She pointed at her car and they started for it. They crossed the street, and he heard the SUV start up behind them but paid no attention, and then the big vehicle was beside them and the doors opened and three men poured out. He was grabbed by the arms before he could react; he shouted, but they were pulling him into the car. He saw her trying to get a hand into her bag, and a man punched her hard and sent her sprawling, and then Alan was on his back on the floor of the SUV and it was starting to move, the doors still open and his feet sticking out. Somebody kicked his legs and there was a lot of shouting and the doors slammed.

       4

      Tel Aviv

      Rose Craik didn’t worry when her husband wasn’t at the hotel at two because she assumed the job had taken longer than he had expected. The possibility annoyed her, nonetheless; she wanted him to climb down from his work for a day, to try to forget the war that now seemed to consume him. She didn’t really want to see a movie; she wanted him to see a movie.

      Or not forget the war, not merely the war in Afghanistan; rather, the altered military world into which he had been launched by September eleventh. He felt guilt, she knew, because US intelligence hadn’t anticipated the attack; he felt a deep, not very well defined anxiety about America itself. When he had said, “Scared people scare me,” she knew that he was trying to express that anxiety for her, perhaps for himself. Sometimes he seemed stunned by the attack’s intricacy and its success; other times he was puzzled by the reaction to it. “We’ve had terrorism against the US for twenty years. Everybody knew al-Qaida was out there. Why is everybody over-reacting?” And the job was grinding him down—literally; she had watched him get thinner over the months.

      Bored now, frustrated, she telephoned home—Bahrain—where a Navy friend was keeping their kids; she said they were fine. She called her office; she was missed but they were getting along. She watched some Israeli television. At three o’clock, she allowed herself to worry.

      At three-twenty, the telephone rang. Intense disappointment when it wasn’t Alan, then a catch of breath when she heard a woman with an accent who said she was with the police. Rose’s gut dropped. The woman said that they had to talk. She was in the lobby—could she come up? Rose was an attaché with all that meant about classified knowledge, being an American in a foreign place. Hotels, even in Israel, weren’t necessarily safe; a public place was better than a room. “I’ll come down.”

      The woman was heavy-set, hard-eyed, maybe a little flamboyant in her loose hair and her bright scarf. She had a bruise on the left side of her face from eye to chin, the eye puffing and darkening. “Miriam Gurion, sergeant, Tel Aviv police.” She held up ID.

      “Is it about—?”

      The woman put a finger to her lips.

      If anybody in the hotel lobby thought it was odd that a woman was holding up a badge and a card, nobody gave any sign. Rose took the card and studied it, handed it back with her own diplomatic passport. She glanced around the lobby, looking for the signs of a watcher, threat, anomaly. What was the woman afraid of?

      Mrs Gurion—she said she was Mrs, not Ms—led her to a deep sofa in an alcove that allowed them to see the doors. When they sat, the sofa gave a kind of sigh, and mounds of pinky gray fabric swelled around them.

      “I think your husband is okay, but the situation is not good.” Tears came to the woman’s eyes. “I am so ashamed. It is my fault—all my fault—” She gulped. “They took me prisoner!”

      Rose’s heart raced but she leaned forward. “Is he all right?”

      “I was with your husband. We were doing a job, maybe you know about it, a man who was dead—”

       “Where is my husband?”

      The СКАЧАТЬ