The same posters he recognized from five years earlier still hung on the walls. Advertisements scavenged from the back dumpster of a travel agency in an unsuccessful attempt to legitimize the place. Panoramas of Fès and Ouarzazate, the Roman ruins at Volubilis. The colors faded now from desert golds and reds to ghostly blues. A world at permanent twilight.
In the rear of the shop, above a long counter emblazoned with airline insignia, an ancient television blared the din of a football match. And behind the counter, his bulk perched on a low stool, facing the screen, sat Abdullah. The turtle, Jamal and the other boys had called him, the crude nickname a reference to more than just his wide body and pinched head.
Jamal took a tentative step forward, and Abdullah glanced over his shoulder. “Get out,” he said gruffly, assessing Jamal with a hasty but practiced glance. The merchandise too old or too worn for his purposes. And then, when Jamal didn't move, “What do you think this is? An employment agency?”
Jamal ducked his head slightly, acutely aware of just how much rested on this one gesture of acquiescence, on the perfection of it. A pantomime of fear and desire at the same time. My child, he could hear Abdullah say, my favorite one. Breath and lips hot on his neck. I'm not hurting you, am I?
For a moment Abdullah's face registered nothing and Jamal was convinced that the man had forgotten him, then the turtle shifted on his stool and leaned forward.
“Jamal?” he wheezed. His eyes were moist with greed.
The prisoners came in blind and confused, shackled, shuffling forward. Naked as newborns, some wailing, others soiling themselves. Not men but cattle to the slaughter.
Kat knew from experience that these first moments of confusion were her single best ally. Once the prisoners made it through the shock of in-processing, through the cavity searches and the haircuts and the delousings, and realized there was nothing worse that could be done to them, they became as uncooperative as two-year-olds. Of those who didn't break in the first twenty-four hours, most never would. The ones who did talk invariably had the least to give.
Kat and the others had been trained on the Cold War model of full-scale conflict between two superpowers. On the premise that most, if not all, of the prisoners they encountered would be happy to tell their captors whatever they knew for a pack of Marlboros and a can of Coke. Nothing had prepared them for the war they were now being asked to fight. None of them could even have imagined it.
At Kandahar, intake and interrogations went strictly by the book, using the standard timeworn approaches Kat and her colleagues had had drilled into them. Classics with names like Fear Up or Love of Comrades, which invariably worked like a charm in mock-up interviews, and which may in fact have been effective on disgruntled Soviet soldiers but were worse than useless in Afghanistan. The few deviations the interrogators eventually made from the manual, like the decision to keep prisoners awake while they themselves pulled all-nighters typing up situation reports, were slowly and painfully agreed upon.
It was Kat's second day at Bagram, her first live shift at the facility, and already she could see that it was a whole different world at the northern base. The prisoners were harder, for one thing, angrier and less cooperative than any of the detainees Kat had encountered at Kandahar. There was an undercurrent of hostility among the interrogators as well, a recklessness Kat had never seen before, a willingness not just to bend the rules but to break them.
“It's a whole different ball game up here,” one of Kat's former team members from Kandahar had told her when they ran into each other in the mess the night before. “It takes some getting used to, but once you do it feels good to be in charge.”
This shift in attitude wasn't the only difference Kat noticed at Bagram. There had been only a
In the rear of the shop, above a long counter emblazoned with airline insignia, an ancient television blared the din of a football match. And behind the counter, his bulk perched on a low stool, facing the screen, sat Abdullah. The turtle, Jamal and the other boys had called him, the crude nickname a reference to more than just his wide body and pinched head.
Jamal took a tentative step forward, and Abdullah glanced over his shoulder. “Get out,” he said gruffly, assessing Jamal with a hasty but practiced glance. The merchandise too old or too worn for his purposes. And then, when Jamal didn't move, “What do you think this is? An employment agency?”
Jamal ducked his head slightly, acutely aware of just how much rested on this one gesture of acquiescence, on the perfection of it. A pantomime of fear and desire at the same time. My child, he could hear Abdullah say, my favorite one. Breath and lips hot on his neck. I'm not hurting you, am I?
For a moment Abdullah's face registered nothing and Jamal was convinced that the man had forgotten him, then the turtle shifted on his stool and leaned forward.
“Jamal?” he wheezed. His eyes were moist with greed.
The prisoners came in blind and confused, shackled, shuffling forward. Naked as newborns, some wailing, others soiling themselves. Not men but cattle to the slaughter.
Kat knew from experience that these first moments of confusion were her single best ally. Once the prisoners made it through the shock of in-processing, through the cavity searches and the haircuts and the delousings, and realized there was nothing worse that could be done to them, they became as uncooperative as two-year-olds. Of those who didn't break in the first twenty-four hours, most never would. The ones who did talk invariably had the least to give.
Kat and the others had been trained on the Cold War model of full-scale conflict between two superpowers. On the premise that most, if not all, of the prisoners they encountered would be happy to tell their captors whatever they knew for a pack of Marlboros and a can of Coke. Nothing had prepared them for the war they were now being asked to fight. None of them could even have imagined it.
At Kandahar, intake and interrogations went strictly by the book, using the standard timeworn approaches Kat and her colleagues had had drilled into them. Classics with names like Fear Up or Love of Comrades, which invariably worked like a charm in mock-up interviews, and which may in fact have been effective on disgruntled Soviet soldiers but were worse than useless in Afghanistan. The few deviations the interrogators eventually made from the manual, like the decision to keep prisoners awake while they themselves pulled all-nighters typing up situation reports, were slowly and painfully agreed upon.
It was Kat's second day at Bagram, her first live shift at the facility, and already she could see that it was a whole different world at the northern base. The prisoners were harder, for one thing, angrier and less cooperative than any of the detainees Kat had encountered at Kandahar. There was an undercurrent of hostility among the interrogators as well, a recklessness Kat had never seen before, a willingness not just to bend the rules but to break them.
“It's a whole different ball game up here,” one of Kat's former team members from Kandahar had told her when they ran into each other in the mess the night before. “It takes some getting used to, but once you do it feels good to be in charge.”
This shift in attitude wasn't the only difference Kat noticed at Bagram. There had been only a
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