Abide with Me by Sabin Willett

Author:Sabin Willett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

FOURTEEN

June 2009

At Bagram Air Base, Brigadier General Andrew Kearse moved ponderously, shifting his bulk on creaky joints. He was grave to the earnest young diplomats from State who came and went in Kabul, sardonic with the officers in Bagram. A Diogenes working combat’s backstage, where warfare and politics clamor in the wings, he searched for amusement. For those whose humor ran dark, as his did, the players in Afghanistan furnished a rich source of material. The Americans and their Afghan faction were then busy with the fiction that the country was free and independent, that purpled thumbs had purchased an actual government rather than a cabal of thieves, that the Americans were allies rather than an occupying force, and that the war was accomplishing something. This was a precarious show, and offstage the actors and their squabbles multiplied. Kearse moved from one to the next. The only thing that mattered, really, was which one made it to the footlights.

“So what’s this latest bed-wetting from the embassy?” he asked.

Two colonels had already arrived for the meeting. They made three in the general’s small conference room. Each had the TOP SECRET/NOFORN memo printed off from the classified printer.

“Village elder and his son murdered in their beds, sir,” Colonel Cooper answered, taking the lead. It was Cooper’s case. “Civilians. Afghans are saying it was our guys.”

“Where?”

“Komal. In the Korengal Valley.”

The Korengal Valley —already famous in the Pentagon as the valley of death.

His glasses perched at the end of his nose, General Kearse read. At length he asked no one in particular, “How the fuck many Ramitullahs do they have in this country anyway—how do you keep them straight?”

He held the report at arm’s length, as if to keep it as far away as possible. “The father blah blah, a son in the same house, blah blah. According to unnamed Afghan sources.”

“Yessir.”

“The unnamed Afghan source—old reliable. Sometime after midnight and before oh four-thirty.” He looked up. “What else do we know?”

“Nothing.”

“The wife finds them?”

“Before the first prayer, sir.”

“She was unharmed?”

“Yes. Hysterical but physically unharmed.”

“What did she see?”

“The victims. And before that, nothing, she slept through it.”

“They got the knife?”

“Negative, sir.”

“Well, what have they got for evidence?”

“An Afghan in the town says he saw one guy leaving. In camo and a mask.”

“An Afghan in the town,” General Kearse repeated. “Who has no name. Or one fucking name, like the rest of them. Colonel, does one guy on patrol sound like us to you?”

“No, sir.”

“Is that firebase—Montana, is it—”

“Montana, sir.”

“Is it in the habit of sending out one-man patrols at two a.m.?”

“No, sir.”

He tossed the report to the table. “Colonel, if this was a model, we’d send her home to eat some pasta, you know? We’d tell her she was too thin. I suppose our solo ninja killer burned a Koran while he was down there.”

“No report of that, sir. But . . . ”

“But what?”

The colonel frowned. “It’s not really Taliban style either, sir. They would claim responsibility, and send anonymous letters to everyone else

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