killing three dozen American sailors and nearly sinking the frigate. Doug had not come here to die.
“Did you hear me!?” the captain yelled. “What is that plane!?”
Vrieger kept staring at Siporski’s screen, cursing to himself.
“F-14,” Vrieger said at last. “Sir, it breaks as an F-14.”
“FANNING.”
He opened his eyes to see Vrieger reaching back from the front seat of the jeep to shake his leg. “Here,” he said, handing him the envelope of cash. “You’re the one who speaks the phrases. This guy looks closed up. You got to get in there quick before he leaves.”
They were parked on a narrow street lined with darkened storefronts, posters with once bright photographs of soda cans and soccer stars plastered over one another on the walls between shop doors. Closed shutters were spaced in no particular pattern across the beige stucco walls of the apartments above, lights visible between the down-turned slats. A bulb still burned in one vendor’s room, a metal grate pulled down over the store window.
Doug felt unsteady crossing the street. The acrid smell of rotting fruit filled his nostrils and he thought he might be sick as he reached the curb. Holding on to the grate, he reached through it with his other hand and tapped on the glass, pointing to the shelf of cigarettes.
The man looked up from behind the counter where he stood over a ledger. More unshaven than bearded, wearing a striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he could have been anywhere from forty to sixty. His face was long and deeply creased. He adjusted his eyes to see who it was who had disturbed him and then shook his head and returned to his calculations.
“I would like cigarettes,” Doug said in mauled Arabic, his voice raised, uttering one of the twenty sentences he’d learned from the phrase book. “I would like cigarettes.”
This time, the man lifted his head slowly, and called out in English, “Kloz’d.”
Grabbing the wad of greenbacks in his fist, Doug banged on the glass. The man put down his pen and walked from behind the counter to stand on the other side of the door.
“Lots,” Doug said. “I need lots. Ten cartons.”
Muttering something he couldn’t hear through the glass, the storekeeper unlocked the door and raised the grate high enough for Doug to dip his head under and enter.
“Only because my customers did not buy what they should this week,” he said. Turning his back, he added, “Otherwise, I would not sell to your kind. Not today.”
From behind a bead curtain, the scent of cooking meat drenched the stuffy air.
More than ever, Doug desired to be gone from these wretched foreign places with all their filth and poverty, to be back in America, starting on his real life, the one he’d been planning for so long. But he found he couldn’t ignore the dark hair on the man’s neck and his small, rounded shoulders and his baggy cotton pants and the sandals strapped over the dusty brown skin of his feet.
Reports on yesterday’s incident were still coming in, Vrieger had told him. At the base, command wasn’t letting the crew see or hear any news from the outside.
It was Vrieger who had reached his hand up to the ceiling panel and turned the key, illuminating a button on Doug’s console he’d only ever seen lit in the dwindling hours of war games: permission to launch.
“Marlboros,” he said, leaning his elbows on the counter, trying to put a stop to the spinning motion in his head. “Give me Marlboros. All of those cartons. I need all of them.”
The shopkeeper stepped onto the second rung of his ladder and reached up to the shelf, where the red-and-white boxes were stacked. Down to his left, behind the counter, a television sat atop a milk crate, the sound turned off. A mustachioed announcer in a double-breasted suit spoke directly to the viewers. The screen then cut to an overview of the inside of an air hangar filled with rows of boxes, groups of people walking along the aisles between them; then came a cut closer in: a man in uniform opening a long black bag for the camera, which zoomed in to hold the shot of a young woman, twenty-five maybe, though on the grainy screen, her face bloated, who could tell? Her corpse grasped in stiffened arms a child of three or four, his body and little grayed head mashed to his mother’s chest. The dead arms gripping tightly the dead boy.