The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman

morning, wheeling noisily across the bay and out over the Atlantic, daintily tightening its arc whenever it approached Cuban airspace. Falk’s new assignment was, as they say, the talk of the town.
    Camp America’s seaside galley looked like a glorified Quonset hut—two bubble-topped chambers of stretched white plastic with only the tiniest of windows, making it seem as if you were eating inside a giant lightbulb. Falk filled a Styrofoam cup with the worst coffee in the Caribbean and headed for his usual table, a collection of civilian and military interrogators, translators, analysts, and clerks.
    Like any society, Gitmo’s was stratified. The MP proletariat of J-DOG, or the Joint Detention Operations Group, tended to keep to itself, nurturing its mistrust of Falk’s would-be elite in the JIG, or Joint Intelligence Group.
    The hirelings of private contractors were also part of the mix, mostly to help make up for the shortage of Arabic speakers and other linguists in the military and U.S. law enforcement. The two biggest players, United Security Corp. and Global Networks, Inc., were also fierce competitors, and lately they had been at each other’s throats. Lawyers were involved. Official complaints had been lodged. So now their foot soldiers tended to sit at their own tables. The rivalry was either hilarious or dismaying, depending on how closely you had to work with them. Falk, in no need of their services, enjoyed promoting the theory that someday two contractors would go to war with each other on some far-flung shore of U.S. occupation, with the winner declaring its own republic.
    Tyndall, one of the few Agency regulars at Falk’s table, beckoned from one end as Falk approached. His face betrayed no sign of their blowup the night before. But Falk wasn’t in the mood. Besides, Pam was waving from the other end, where she’d saved him a seat.
    His relationship with Pam Cobb was another of Gitmo’s open secrets. It offered a reading on the local sexual climate, which was both repressed and abundant, a Peyton Place painted alternately in Army drab and the sensual colors of the tropics.
    Falk would wager that there were more pent-up libidos per square mile on this scuffed little heel of Cuba than in any town in America. And why wouldn’t there be? Cook up a steam-bath climate in confined isolation, add soldiers, then more soldiers, and presto. Ratcheting the tension higher, males vastly outnumbered females. The long odds turned some men into slavering hunter-gatherers, knuckles dragging the ground. Marital status seemed to have little to do with it. It was like those ads for Vegas. What happened at Gitmo stayed at Gitmo. Or so you hoped.
    Even Falk found himself returning to some of his Marine tactics of old, equipping himself with the customary tools of Gitmo courtship on his first shopping trip to the Naval Exchange—a blender for margaritas, a shaker for martinis, a hibachi for the patio, and a packet of condoms for emergencies.
    It was the one forbidden act for which the authorities had tacitly agreed to look the other way. As if they had a choice. Try keeping a lid on it and the whole place might blow, leaving 640 inmates running the asylum.
    Gitmo’s living arrangements only added to the intrigue. The few MPs who hadn’t yet moved into the new barracks were stuffed into vacant apartments in base housing, up to eight to a unit in a five-room place. Interrogators and linguists had also been farmed out to empty quarters, which were numerous now that the local Navy population was near its all-time low.
    The most popular neighborhoods were Villa Mar and Windward Loop, where the billeting was often four to a unit, and two to every bedroom. It was like going back to college, with all the same challenges to romantic privacy—sneak a girl up to the dorm, hold the roommates at bay, and keep your friends guessing, with everyone making it back to their separate bunks by