chapter 21
At night, from his hotel balcony, Doug watched the Jaguars and Porsches cruise up and down Arabian Gulf Road blaring pop music as they glided by the armored cars that had appeared recently at intersections all over Kuwait City. According to the concierge, the American schools had announced an unscheduled six-week vacation and the ex-pats not here for the war were leaving with their children by the hundreds. But in the evenings along the promenade the Kuwaiti families still picnicked on the grass, enjoying the mild winter air and the views of the glittering towers up and down the waterfront, leaving their trash on the ground behind them for the municipal workers to collect - the Filipinos and Pakistanis, who came by in their minivans and green jumpsuits to spear the crumpled plastic bags and date wrappers and empty soda cans tipping and rolling in the breeze.
When he couldn't sleep Doug walked the city, whose citizens seemed to stay up all night shopping in the twenty-four-hour supermarkets. There were American sailors about as well, up from the naval base for their sober nights out on the town. He did his best to avoid them, though he knew his chances of being detected here were small. He'd been careful, at first, sounding out other guests at the hotel about which contractors might be hiring, thinking he needed to avoid the firms working directly with the State Department. But soon he'd realized how far the demand for people outstripped the supply and just how many of the men here were themselves not so interested in anyone knowing much about their past. If you were an American and a firm wanted you, the background check was often skipped lest it prove inconvenient.
Passing through the streets of low-rise apartments he'd reach Al Taawun Street from where he could see over the resorts and the private compounds to the coast, the lights of skiffs and police boats mingling with the more distant signals of tankers headed south with their American escorts for the Strait of Hormuz.
In all his life he'd never had this much time on his hands; such idleness was a menace to him. In the hotel room, he felt caged but out walking there was nothing to do but think. Seeing the young sailors in their dress whites moving in packs along the sidewalks put him in mind of when he'd left for the navy and what he'd imagined lay ahead of him back then.
He'd ridden the commuter train into Boston with his suitcase and knapsack and crossing the dingy concourse of South Station boarded a Greyhound that had taken the better part of two days to carry him up to the Naval Station Great Lakes, there along the western shore of Lake Michigan.
Through the dead of night on that trip, as the other passengers dozed, Doug had put on his Walkman and watched the fencing alongside the highway tick by in the headlights, the flat expanses of Ohio and then Indiana stretching out in every direction, the farmland parceled into one forty-acre field after another, as dark and empty a landscape as his Eastern eyes had ever seen. With the signs for Gary and Chicago, lights appeared and soon the streets were bright with lamps above the barren parking lots and block-long warehouses. As the bus bounded over paved gorges of underpasses and empty surface roads, a panorama that made the Alden strip seem like little more than a candle's light came into view: acre after acre of oil tanks and cylinders connected by masses of strut work and pipes running this way and that, white smoke jetting from valves up and down the tangle of steel, lit by thousands of naked yellow bulbs lining ladders and catwalks and above this vast tract of works, a giant orange flame billowing from the tip of a steel column like some temple fire undulating against the pale-yellow sky.
Before that trip, he'd never slept more than a single night away from home. He had signed up for the navy without ever having set foot on a boat. His first day out on a training vessel he kept thinking of the movie he'd seen on television as a kid about the sinking of the Bismarck and how when a ship was attacked and started taking on water, the sailors' orders were to seal off the flooding compartments along with the men trapped inside them. When the whitecaps came up on the lake and the boat began rocking, he grew so nervous he thought he'd be sick. But then the boy next to him threw up. Doug watched with fascination the disdain in the eyes of the training officer as he handed the kid a brush and pail and told him to scrub. Gripping the rails, the others had looked on as their fellow recruit got down on his hands and knees, reaching for the streaks of his own vomit running over the deck.
He'd seen then that fear was a question of balance. As long as he saw more of it in the faces of those around him than he himself displayed - that is, as long as he had confidence - he would do more than survive. He would gain. Or so he'd imagined.
Kuwaiti civilians were no longer being allowed into the northern part of the country. Only the farmers and their foreign laborers were permitted to remain. The highway leading up to the border was said to be clogged with American convoys. It wouldn't be long now, people agreed. During the day the government ran drills for possible Scud attacks and at the hotel restaurant in the evenings there were stories of UN staff departing and civilian contractors moving onto the American bases for protection.
Finally, Doug got the call from his new employer informing him of the date for his team's departure. That night, he dreamt he was in the back row at St. Mary's in Alden, listening to Father Griffin deliver his sermon, the congregation fixed in their seats and silent. All except his mother who sat in the front pew beside Nate. She leaned over to whisper words in the boy's ear and Nate nodded in agreement. Then, as the sermon continued, the two of them stood and walked back down the aisle together passing Doug without so much as a glance. Right past him and out the doors of the church. Father Griffin kept speaking and the people kept listening and no one appeared to take any notice.
Walking through Dasman Square the next day, he thought he saw Nate among a group of sailors, and he followed them for a while, waiting for a chance to get ahead of them but when he did he saw that he'd been mistaken and that their faces were all as blank and remorseless as his own. Again in the evening, on one of the narrow streets by the vegetable market, he became convinced that a kid in jeans and a sweatshirt making his way through the crowd up ahead must be Nate. And yet for all his certainty, the person turned out to be a man in his late twenties, Scandinavian or German, a reporter or photographer who when Doug grabbed him by the arm wheeled about looking wide-eyed with terror, as if he expected at that very moment to be stabbed.
On the appointed morning, he took a taxi to the port, where alongside the warehouse that the security firm had rented a few GIs stood leaning against their Humvee, chewing tobacco and eyeing their older civilian charges with a mixture of envy and contempt. Inside, the armored Suburbans were being loaded with food and equipment. The drive to the border would take about two hours, depending on the convoy traffic. Each of the eight men - four Americans, two Brits, a Chilean, and an Australian - signed their final waivers and were issued satellite phones.
Doug traveled in the lead car, which kept a hundred yards back from the Humvee that led them speeding up the six-lane highway. For miles they saw nothing but sand and limestone gravel and the occasional paved lot of rusting oil drums. As they reached the outskirts of Al Abdaly, rows of greenhouses came into view, hundreds of them shimmering in the sun, and beyond them fields full of oblong tanks, which the driver said were filled with tilapia, grown here by the thousands using the same groundwater that irrigated the strawberries under all that glass.
"Fish in the desert!" the guy beside Doug said. His name was Bill Gunther and he was from Tennessee. He had three kids in grade school and said he was being paid more than he'd imagined possible.
They arrived at the border truck stop and could see across the line into Iraq, past the unmanned checkpoint and the demilitarized zone, where a UN watchtower stood empty. It would be six or seven hours before they crossed, just after nightfall. They kept close to the vehicles, listening to the distant grind of earthmovers working up and down the line of control, flattening the dirt berm to make way for the first wave of the invading army.
At dusk, they began to hear jets streaking overhead. Moving off, away from the others, Doug wandered over the road and down a path that led past a diesel station to a shipping warehouse, its lot empty and its cargo doors shut.
Along this stretch the electric border fence still stood; behind it were coiled rows of concertina wire set in front of a wide, deep ditch in the sand. The empty highway beyond these defenses ran from here to Safwan: the highway of death, where the American planes had made of the retreating conscripts a smoldering graveyard back in '91.
Soon, thankfully, the idleness and the thinking would end and the present would once more absorb all Doug's attention. As the sounds of the impending blitz grew louder, the image of his young mother came to him once again, the person he remembered, the person he'd kept close, walking back down the aisle of the church with Nate. He could make no sense of it.
"You coming with us or what?" Gunther called out to him. He'd been sent by the team's leader to find their stray member. "Looks like the show's just about started."
To the north, a massive cloud of dust hung suspended above the roar of the advancing troops, artillery rounds starting to flash within it like lightning revealing the shape of a distant thunderhead. Soon would come the earsplitting shout of bombs.
Checking the holster of his flak jacket, Doug fingered the metal of his gun.
Under the rules established by the firm, none of them knew the identity of their client. They had been told only that it was not a government but a private entity, one that was paying top dollar. There were documents and a computer in the offices of the oil depot at Umm Qasr and someone wanted them secured.