Wrecked

Do you know what Abraham Lincoln said after a six-day drunk?" Jimenez said.

"What?" Hawkins said.

"I freed who?"

They laughed in wheezing coughs. Hawkins took another hit off the joint, leaned back in the chair, and put his size ninety-five combat boots up on the table. Jimenez felt sorry for the table and even sorrier for the chair.

"Want some?" Hawkins said, offering up the joint.

"No," Richter said, "that shit makes me sleepy." He was eating a massive burrito, napkin tucked into his collar, carnitas smeared all over his mouth. He was smoking between bites. What a pig, Jimenez thought. He took the joint, took a hit.

"Do you know why General Santa Anna only brought six hundred soldiers to the Alamo?" Hawkins said.

"No, I don't."

"Because he only had two cars."

That afternoon they'd driven out to Simi Valley. A commuter town; row upon row of tract houses surrounded by parched hills. There were a lot of baseball fields. Teams played at night because it was too damn hot in the daytime. Walczak owned an industrial park. There was a big FOR LEASE sign you could see from the freeway. Plastic bags blew across the empty parking lot like urban tumbleweed. Pigeons peered down from the roof. They parked in the delivery bay and dragged Sneaky Pete out by his elbows. Hawkins had worked him over in the van. He liked doing that kind of shit. Jimenez didn't mind but he didn't enjoy it. Hawk was the only person he'd ever met that was mad all the damn time. Richter was useless, never doing anything until he ran out of excuses.

Sneaky Pete was limp and babbling when they dragged him up the stairs into a third-floor office. Nothing there but some cardboard boxes, overflowing wastebaskets, and a few tables and chairs. Half the fluorescents were out and tiles were missing from the ceiling, wires dangling down.

They enhanced-interrogated him but he held out. Damn good for a private citizen, better than a lot of professionals. Jimenez wished Slayer was here. You want to get somebody to talk, put a big, black snarling German shepherd three inches away from his dick. Motherfucker will pay you to confess. Jimenez had neon lines and floating rectangles in his head but he took another hit anyway. His mouth watering for one of those crazy munchies Hawkins liked to make; hot Cheetos, Nutella popsicles, chocolate chip waffles with peanut butter and bacon. Hawkins liked to do shit like that. Put stuff together. Once, when they were home between tours, Jimenez watched him make cannabis oil to treat his mother's cancer symptoms.

"First, you gotta wash it," Hawkins said. He put a couple ounces of primo weed in a bowl, poured in some benzene, and carefully rinsed and squeezed the leaves. "Extracts all the cannabinoids," he said.

"Doesn't benzene mess you up?" Jimenez said.

"Cooks off. Leaves no residue. You just gotta remember to have a fan on and not to smoke." Hawkins put the liquid into a coffee filter and strained out the stems and debris. Then he poured what was left into a rice cooker and reduced it down to something that looked like axle grease with a reddish tint. He put the stuff in a double boiler and added some coconut oil.

"Is that for flavor?"

"No. It homogenizes and activates the cannabinoids," Hawkins said, Jimenez wondering if Hawk knew what he was talking about.

"It's a lotta damn trouble. Why don't you just give her a joint?"

"You can't control the dose. A gram of this stuff a day helps her out and doesn't make her high."

"Still, it's a lotta damn trouble."

Hawk gave him a look that used to scare the shit out of the Iraqi prisoners and everybody else on the tier too. "It's my mother."

Eveline Owens came in, an unfiltered Camel behind her ear. She was carrying a cardboard tray from Starbucks, her turn to make the coffee run. Owens was raised on a cattle ranch in Montana or North Dakota, somewhere. She was tall and knobby-looking, like she had too many elbows and knees, with a long Jersey Maid face and the biggest hands Jimenez had ever seen on a girl. She probably won a lot of blue ribbons for roping cows or churning butter or whatever the fuck they did out there. Jimenez had tapped that ass a few times, but there weren't a lot of options over there. She was what they called a 4-10-4. A 4 in her hometown, a 10 over there, and a 4 when she got back home.

"This drink is for faggots," she said. She handed Hawkins a cup of something that had the word caramel in it twice.

"What'd you get?" Hawkins said. "A bale of hay?"

Owens was a little glassy-eyed. She'd been drinking since they'd arrived, a six-pack all herself. She drank a lot at Abu Ghraib but now she was a full-on alcoholic. Jimenez reminded himself not to rely on her. She gave Richter his coffee.

"Thanks," he said, not looking up from the paper. You could hardly read for the blotches of burrito grease.

"How are the wife and kiddies, Jimenez?" she said.

"I don't know. Carla won't let me come home."

"She find out you had shit for brains?"

"No. I boned her too good and wore her ass out."

Jimenez, Hawkins, and Owens were all on tier 1, where they kept the security detainees, the poor bastards who were suspected of attacking US troops or knowing something about it. Jimenez was a military intelligence reservist, called up for duty because there weren't enough officers to abuse the detainees. Hawkins and Owens were both MPs. The lieutenant colonel and chief warrant officers were supposed to be in charge but you pretty much did whatever you wanted. A couple of the other guys had served at Guantánamo, but other than that nobody from the CO on down had any experience in running a prison, collecting intelligence, conducting interrogations, or any other relevant subject. At the time, the insurgency was everywhere, the entire area in chaos. Whole families were scooped up. Maybe two or three out of a hundred had anything to say that you could call intelligence and the longer they were detained, the older and more meaningless their information became.

Nobody really knew who was doing what. There was the CIA, military intelligence, the outside contractors, CACI and Titan and OGAs or "Other Government Agencies." Everyone called them ghosts because you didn't know who they reported to; MI, Task Force 121, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or some other secret organization full of mysterious motherfuckers with a budget hidden in the farm bill. The CIA guys and outside contractors did most of the interviews, if you could call screaming, threatening, breaking furniture, slapping, punching, or throwing the detainee down a stairwell an interview. The MPs were instructed to soften them up, which really meant they were turned loose to do whatever the hell they wanted. No instructions, regulations, limits, guidelines, or supervision.

When Jimenez looked back on it, he still had to shake his head in wonder. Take a bunch of grunts who were hard sons of bitches to begin with and who'd watched the 9/11 tape a thousand times or maybe had a friend shot in the head by a sniper or blown up by an IED and put them in one of Saddam's filthy, overcrowded, medieval dungeons with no water, power, or ventilation and shitty food, and then shell them night and day and kill some of them so they were afraid all the time, and then leave them alone in concrete bunkers with their fear and their testosterone and their angry, pent-up frustration, and then tell them to soften up the inmates who might have a cousin out there lobbing mortar rounds at you and surprise-surprise, bad shit was bound to happen. Even when you got time off, how were you supposed to relax? Your recreational choices were video games, video games, and fucking anything with a pulse. The only available liquor didn't even have a name. They called it raw drink. A fifth for ten bucks. It was so strong even Owens had to mix it with grape soda.

The whole world had seen the photos. Detainees wearing hoods and standing on boxes with their arms straight out or hung from railings in stress positions or piled on top of each other naked or bleeding and beat to shit. Poor Lynndie England. She was the poster child for that clusterfuck. She was the short girl with the boy's haircut who got her picture taken leading a prisoner on a dog leash and standing next to a line of hooded detainees grinning and pointing at their dicks. Fortunately, she wasn't in the photo of a prisoner kneeling with his mouth open and another prisoner masturbating in front of him, but she did quip, "Look, he's getting a hard-on!" A remark that didn't help her at the trial.

Charlie Graner took the pictures. He was a specialist, a rank somewhere between a private and a corporal. He unofficially ran the tier along with some other untrained, unqualified assholes. Graner was all over Lynndie as soon as she arrived. He was twice her age and smelled her vulnerability. Once he had his grappling hooks in her she did anything he said, and he was a mean bastard too.

Lynndie got three years, Graner received ten. Hawkins, Jimenez, and Owens were dishonorably discharged because there wasn't enough evidence to indict them. Walczak knew he'd never get a promotion unless he singlehandedly killed everybody in Al Qaeda, so he resigned.

And get this: Nobody in the top brass got busted. Not a single one. Not the brigade commander, prison commander, operational supervisor, or anybody else above the rank of sergeant. All they got was a reprimand. A reprimand? What the hell was that anyway? They called you into the principal's office and smacked your hand with a ruler? And do you know what the head of the CIA, that chickenshit Panetta, said? That the officers were paid to do a job, they did it, and he was giving them the benefit of the doubt. The benefit of the doubt? Those motherfuckers get the benefit of the doubt? The ones who gave the orders, encouraged them, egged them on, told them they were doing a good job? They get off without a scratch? Meanwhile, you were a pariah. Tell somebody you were at Abu Ghraib and you might as well say you went to the Congo and had sex with a howler monkey.

Jimenez felt bad about what he'd done. He told himself he was a different person back then, that it was circumstances, that anybody would have gone crazy if they were put in that position. But the shit still haunted him. He wondered if Walczak and the others were haunted too. Did they wake up at 2 a.m. hearing the prisoners scream and seeing the agony on their faces as they cowered in a corner bloodied and pleading for their lives?

He wondered if Panetta ever felt bad about letting everybody off the hook except the people who were responsible. Unlikely, Jimenez thought. You know what he'd say? What was I supposed to do? Turn the CIA, MI, and CACI upside down? Take depositions from the hundreds of people connected with Abu Ghraib? Interview every prisoner and stack up so much evidence they'd have to keep it in an airplane hangar? Reassign every attorney in JAG and Department of Justice to handle the cases? Spend years and millions of dollars sorting out who was to blame for each individual act of abuse and who was responsible for supervising them all the way up to that moron Rumsfeld? No. Better to bust a few ordinary soldiers and heap the blame on them. I mean, let's move on, shall we? We've got two wars to fight.

Jimenez finished off the joint and dropped it on the floor. His cell buzzed. "Shit. It's Fuckhead. You want to talk to him?"

"Hell no," Hawkins said.

"I'm eating," Richter said.

"Well, I ain't talkin' to him," Owens said, popping the cap off another Coors. "I'm drunk."

Jimenez put the call on speaker. "What's up, Balzac?"

"It's Walczak," Walczak said, like his name was a rank. "Status report." Jimenez looked at Hawkins and Owens. Do you believe this asshole?

"I'm Mexican, sir. We don't have no status." Owens grinned. Hawkins laughed out loud. Richter kept eating.

"Not funny, Jimenez. I want a status report."

Jimenez suddenly sounded panicky and desperate. "Sir, we're taking fire from hostiles, battalion strength!" he shouted. "We're black on ammo, sir, and the Stryker's down." Hawkins started whistling like incoming rounds and making that explosion sound kids make, Owens ack-acked like a machine gun. "They've got eighties, MBTs, RMGs, forty mike-mikes, SAMs, and ICBMs!" Jimenez screamed into the phone. "Get us out of here, sir! We need air support! We need evac! Oh no! It's Owens, sir! She took one in the ass crack!" Owens and Hawkins were doubled over with their mouths wide open.

"Stop screwing around!" Walczak shouted. "What's going on, Jimenez? I want to know now."

"Nothing so far but we're working on it. Say, Balzac, you're Polish, aren't you?"

"It's Walcz—yeah, what about it?"

"Do you know what they call a Polack with a hundred and fifty girlfriends?"

"No, I don't."

"A shepherd."

More hysterics. Richter blew out a mouthful of carnitas. Hawkins fell over backward and crashed to the floor.

"Are you finished?" Walczak said.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm finished," Jimenez said, tears in his eyes.

"Has the detainee said anything?"

"No, he hasn't said anything."

"Could somebody check on him, please?"

"I'm eating," Richter said.

"Don't look at me," Owens said. "I made the coffee run."

"Hold on," Jimenez said.

Jimenez and Hawkins went over to the supply closet and opened the door. It was empty, bare walls, the carpet ripped out. It was cold, the air conditioning was turned up high. A demonic voice spewed hate rock from a boom box so loud you'd think it would shatter Owens's beer bottles. Sneaky Pete was curled up on the bare cement. His hands were zip-tied behind his back. He was naked and shivering and groaning. He was wearing a hood they'd dipped in hot sauce before they'd put it on him but the effects had worn off, or at least he'd stopped screaming.

Jimenez turned the music off. "How long's he been without water?"

"Since we picked him up," Hawkins said. "Let's see if he's ready." Hawk used the toe of his boot and gave Sneaky Pete a stiff nudge in the ribs. He groaned in pain. Hawkins had punched him there a bunch of times, you could see the bruises. Jimenez knelt down and ripped off the hood. Sneaky gulped fresh air.

"What's up, Sneaky?" Jimenez said.

"Water…please, water," he croaked.

Owens came in with her beer. "You tell us what we want to know and you can have all the water you can drink." She emptied the bottle on the floor. "Don't that look good?" Sneaky opened his mouth and tried to catch some of the drops splashing on his face.

Walczak was yelling from the phone. "Okay, that's it! You've had him all day and you're supposed to be professionals! I want results by nineteen hundred hours, no excuses!" He ended the call.

"He's right," Jimenez said. "We should get this done. It's our asses too."

"Then enough of this bullshit," Hawkins said.

He hauled Sneaky to his feet and slammed him against the wall. He leaned in close, nose-to-nose. "You think this is bad, asshole? This is nothing. This is a day at the beach. This is Disneyland. I'll put you in so much pain you'll be beggin' for me to slit your throat." Hawk put his hand around Sneaky Pete's jaw, his fingers like the claws of a crane, squeezing so hard Sneaky's cheeks were almost touching. Hawk screamed into his face, spit flying out of his mouth. "NOW START TALKING MOTHERFUCKER OR I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL CUT YOUR GODDAMN DICK OFF AND HANG IT AROUND YOUR NECK!" Hawk banged Sneaky Pete's head against the wall. "DO YOU HEAR ME? DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?" Hawkins kept banging and screaming. "TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW AND TELL ME RIGHT FUCKING NOW! OPEN YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH AND TELL ME!"

"Hold it, hold it, Hawk," Jimenez said. "You're gonna kill the guy." Richter was standing in the doorway, an unfeeling motherfucker if there ever was one, and even he was incredulous. Hawk was breathing hard, glaring into Sneaky's eyes. Sneaky looked back at him, in pain but unafraid. More blank, like. Stoic. A tough motherfucker.

"Fuck it, " Jimenez said. "Owens, find a table where we can lay him down. Did somebody bring a bucket?"

"It's in the van," Hawkins said.

"Get it. Fill it with water. And see if you can find a towel too." Hawk let go of Sneaky and let him slump to the floor.

"You gotta admit," Jimenez said. "The guy's pretty tough."

"What's this asshole's name again?"

"Isaiah. They call him IQ."