The men all laughed, Mancini so hard he started to choke.
Akil asked, “You like that one, Sandra?”
“Not bad.”
“You’re hard to please.”
Mancini: “How about this? There was this older guy who wanted to make his younger wife pregnant. So he went to the doctor to have a sperm count done. The doc tells him to take a specimen cup home, fill it up, and bring it back the next day. The next day the old guy comes back. The specimen cup’s empty and the lid’s still on it. The doctor asks, ‘What was the problem?’ The old guy says, ‘Well, I tried with my right hand…nothing. So I tried with my left. That didn’t work, either. Then my wife took over. She tried with her right, then her left, then her mouth. Each time…nothing. Then my wife’s friend tried. Right hand, left hand, mouth. Still nothing.’ Hearing this, the doctor said, ‘Wait a minute. Your wife’s friend tried, too?’ ‘That’s right,’ the old man answered. ‘None of us could get the lid off the specimen cup.’ ”
Sandra laughed this time and said, “I like that one better.”
Akil leaned over the seat and asked, “What about you, Sandra? You know any good jokes?”
Crocker was about to change the subject, but the German seemed game.
She shut her laptop and said, “Three guys go to a ski lodge, and there aren’t enough rooms, so they have to share a bed. In the middle of the night the guy sleeping on the right wakes up and says, ‘I just had this wild, very vivid dream about getting a hand job.’ The guy on the left says, ‘That’s funny. I had the same dream.’ The guy in the middle says, ‘Not me. I dreamt I was skiing.’ ”
They laughed, then Ritchie said, “The guy in the middle was Davis!”
Davis: “Grow up, Ritchie.”
“Never. Fuck you.”
Crocker: “Okay, guys. Settle down. We’re almost there.”
After a little more than four hours in the air, the CC-130 started to descend. All Crocker could see out the side windows was a thin ribbon of highway surrounded by desert. When the plane passed a few hundred feet over a collection of what looked like shacks on either side of the highway, Sandra said, “That’s it. That’s Toummo.”
Akil: “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Looks like the end of the earth, yes?”
As soon as the plane touched down on a landing strip alongside the NATO base, Polish soldiers arrived in trucks and started unloading the supplies. Crocker and the others exited out the side door and were greeted by a big man with enormous arms and a broad chest wearing an olive-green tank top and camouflage shorts.
He said in English, “I’m Major Ostrowski. Welcome to our base. Officially, it’s known as Base Toummo, but we call it Base Piasek Burza. Or you might prefer the English translation, Base Sandstorm.”
The camp housed two dozen soldiers and was roughly two hundred feet square, surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall of sand, gravel, rock, Conex containers, and sheets of metal. Inside were tents, mud buildings, lookout towers, picnic tables, electric generators, an oven, showers, a latrine, a pen filled with goats, and a barbecue pit.
The major showed them to their quarters—cell-like rooms in a mud-walled structure with a corrugated metal roof. Tiny windows allowed very little air to circulate, so even though the sun had set, the quarters continued to be stifling.
Two men were assigned to a room, except for Crocker and Sandra, who each got their own.
Crocker said, “You can give mine to someone else. I’d rather sleep outside.”
“Not a good idea,” the major answered, scratching the bristle of light brown hair on his square sunburned head. “For the past seven nights the tribesmen have been shelling us. Terrible aim, but maybe they get lucky.”
The major seemed to view the recent fighting as no big deal.
“Are these Tuareg tribesmen you’re talking about?” Crocker asked, knowing that they populated the area.
“Tuareg. Yes.”
“What do they want?”
“Control of the open-pit uranium mines, what else? That way they can sell the ore to Iran and China.”
“And the mines are close by?”
“About seventy kilometers northwest of us, past the town and deeper into Libyan territory.”
“That far?” Crocker asked.
“The terrain makes it hard to get to them if you don’t take the road. In my opinion, the camp’s too close. The dust is going to make all be radioactive by the time we leave. Already my penis glows in the dark.”
That night, after dining on roast goat and couscous, and watching the movie Iron Man dubbed in Polish, they retired to their quarters. Soon after Crocker lay down he heard the first mortar land and shake the ground. Shards of shrapnel rained onto the metal roof. Then the NATO troops returned fire with machine guns and artillery of their own.