When he got back to his warehouse, Anakopolous sat down at his desk in the dark and listened to the helicopters heading off. Night raids left just after midnight, usually, and came back around five. The uninformed admiration his British colleague had directed at him had left him sour. He really was a cartoon, hairy or not. Living his empty life here in dusty Kandahar. Hanging out with a guy he pretended was, but who wasn't really, his friend – just an occupier of a position comparable to his.
He turned on his laptop and checked his private e-mail. Penis Extenderz, and a barrister from Togo with a dead client. Some friends, dropping lines, wondering why he'd been so quiet. There was no e-mail from her. There never was. She was signed into Facebook, though. One of these days she would defriend him. If she had any idea how much time he spent creeping her, she would have, already. She'd posted that her son was about to graduate from middle school. The boy had been in Grade 2 when he was first deployed here. Which put things in perspective.
He dug into his pocket and pulled out the thumb drive Shipman had given him. He plugged it in and the contents fluttered up as thumbnails over the screen. Even in miniature, they were horrifying – or would have been, had he not become so used to everything.
He started scrolling through them. One of the contributors to this file was actually an ambitious photographer. There was a shot of tailors in a shattered shop making suits that caught his eye. Inevitably, there were the bodies, and the many indignities offered to them. Canadian snipers up in Tora Bora posing with necklaces of little fingers. American Marines pissing on corpses. Danes shooting motionless bodies lying in a ditch. He clicked through the carnage, looking for interesting photos. There weren't many.
And there. Who was that blonde? The fucking embed. Posing with Lancaster Fusiliers in Iraq. Arms around the smiling men on either side of her. Another of her holding an AK-47. Posing like a killer.
"Oh, sweetheart," he whispered. And he thought again of how she had spoken to his clerk. And he remembered the way that media liaison had spoken to him. Reporters posing with weapons. They did it sometimes, especially the young ones and especially in the first few weeks. But those kinds of images? Among other reporters, better a sex tape emerge than a senior journalist be caught posing like that. He thought for a moment about her sneer and then he took a new laptop from a stack of cases in one corner of his crowded office. In a few minutes he had it up and running. Then he signed into the civilian Wi-Fi net and Yahoo using an account that had been dormant for a year – guys who had come through over the years gave him their Wi-Fi and e-mail account names and passwords for lots of reasons. To send things off for them. To say goodbye to someone, if something bad happened. To delete every single JPEG in their account. One of them got killed. A couple of the others killed themselves. He had done his duty by all of them, but he still had a handful of account passwords. He used one of them now. One of the suicides.
He went into a VPN and entered the address for the InformationIsFree dropbox, which he'd heard about in a routine security briefing months ago. Some joker in Iraq had sent out some documents about prisoner abuse. It was a problem, apparently, because they hadn't been able to trace the leak. So if any of your guys are talking about that site, let us know, okay? Those documents got into the papers just after the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up. Caused all kinds of trouble.
The dropbox was simple to use. Which was good. Because he was still drunk. But not too drunk to find the embed's photo and click send, and shamble off to his cot. Not too drunk to wake up an hour later and wonder why the laptop was still whirring and clicking. He got up, scratching his balls through his military issue green boxers, and peered at the screen. And then he was abruptly sober.
Select all.
He pulled the thumb drive and frantically signed off the internet and out of the Wi-Fi. He flushed so deeply his hair hurt. And then he puked into his wastebasket. He had sent every file on that thumb drive to the dropbox. Every fucking file.
He stuck the drive in again and scrolled more methodically through the images. There were photos of uniformed Americans and Poles and Brits and Australians looking sunburnt and euphoric. There were pictures of children in the street and of women in the market. Some of these were beautiful. But most of the photos were of bodies. Sometimes they were powerful enough to possess a sort of anti-beauty. There was a short video of a Bradley Armoured Fighting Vehicle running over a ditch with enemy in it. Parts flying back. All you could hear was the racket of the armoured fighting vehicle. There was a helmet cam video of one of Saddam's palaces being looted. Another helmet cam video of a firefight in Tikrit. And a series of videos taken off the gunsights of Apache helicopters and A-10s. This stuff was never intended to get out to the public. Not by the people who made these images, nor by the soldiers who traded them. He fell back on his cot, nauseous and dizzy. He laid an arm over his eyes. He could not believe he had just done that.
The next morning, Anakopolous sat on the edge of his cot in his office and pushed his hands into his face like it was putty. The base was stirring. His posting to the dropbox hung in his thoughts with ill-shaped and shadowed self-contempt.
There was a knock.
"Yeah?"
"You okay in there, Master Sergeant?"
"Yeah."
Robertson stuck his head in the door. "Base Supp O called a minute ago. On his way over."
"'Kay."
"Be here in fifteen."
"'Kay." He stood and dressed. It was six-thirty. The current base supply officer was the twelfth he had worked with since 2002. By now, the person everyone was terrified of was usually Anakopolous. Today he was the one who was scared. He stood up and started to shave. He cut himself twice.
Excerpted from News from the Red Desert by Kevin Patterson. Copyright © 2016 Kevin Patterson. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved.
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Q&A with author Kevin Patterson
The novel takes place in Afghanistan, a country where you've spent time. Why did you want to write about it?
I'm interested in the war in Afghanistan and The Global War on Terror more broadly because it has changed us and Western society profoundly. I'm particularly interested in the way we depict it to ourselves. The representations of that war in the press and in movies seemed to me while we were fighting it to be more much like sports coverage than the sort of sombre skepticism that attended earlier wars. This was a product of the way our media works now, as infotainment and also the way the coverage of the war was manipulated by the military. The war was sold to the public as an act of altruism. The complicated part being that, so far as the West was trying to export the institutions it most values, in an effort to make these faraway cultures more stable and tolerant, it was partly that. Nevertheless, our allies publicly embraced torture and we killed thousands of people. This contradiction was appealing to me as novelist. Novels permit the writer and the reader to entertain mutually contradictory truths simultaneously. They're probably better at that than any other form of writing.
Set up the scene for us. Who is Anakopolous and what's he doing?
Anakopolous is an American supply sergeant who works on the base at Kandahar Airfield. He has been there for years, and his relationship has crumbled due to his long absence. The conflicting pressures of duty and his failing love affair make him erratic. He comes to possess a trove of "war porn," images of fighting traded among the soldiers. In a drunken attempt to get back a journalist he has words with, he uploads images he didn't intend to share on a Wikileaks-style website. This sets of a search for the leaker, and a re-evaluation of the gap between the nature of war and how it is understood.
This is your first novel in a decade; how do you feel, a few weeks from publication?
I spent most of the years working on another book, one I haven't finished yet, about my twin brother and a long ocean voyage I made a few years before going to Afghanistan. It's proven more slippery to write than I expected (evidently) and I took a break to write this book. It is a fine feeling to finish something again. Mostly what I feel is gratitude to my editor, Anne Collins, at Random House, for her patience and support.