Betrayal

1

A burnt-orange sun kissed the horizon to the west as twenty-six-year-old Second Lieutenant Evan Scholler led his three-pack of converted gun-truck support Humvees through the gates of the Allstrong Compound in the middle of an area surrounded by palm trees, canals, and green farmland. The landscape here was nothing like the sandy, flat, brown terrain that Evan had grown used to since he'd arrived in Kuwait. The enclosure was about the size of three football fields, protected, like every other "safe" area, by Bremer walls-twelve-foot-tall concrete barriers topped with concertina wiring. Ahead of him squatted three double-wide motor home trailers that Allstrong Security, an American contracting company, had provided for its local employees.

Pulling up to the central temporary building, over which flew an American flag, Evan stepped out of his car onto the gravel that extended as far as he could see in all directions. A fit-looking American military type stood in the open doorway and now came down the three steps, his hand extended. Evan snapped a salute and the man laughed.

"You don't need to salute me, Lieutenant," he said. "Jack Allstrong. Welcome to BIAP." Calling Baghdad International Airport by its nickname. "You must be Scholler."

"Yes, sir. If you're expecting me, that's a nice change of pace."

"Gotten the runaround, have you?"

"A little bit. I've got eight men here with me and Colonel…I'm sorry, the commander here?"

"Calliston."

"That's it. He wasn't expecting us. Calliston said you had some beds we could use."

"Yeah, he called. But all we've got are cots really."

"We've got our own on board," Evan said. "We're okay with cots."

Allstrong's face showed something like sympathy. "You all been on the road awhile?"

"Three days driving up from Kuwait with a Halliburton convoy, four days wandering around between here and Baghdad, watching out for looters and getting passed off around the brass. Now here we are. If you don't mind, sir, none of my men have seen a bed or a regular meal or a shower since we landed. You mind if we get 'em settled in first?"

Allstrong squinted through the wind at Evan, then looked over to the small line of Humvees, with their M60 Vietnam-era machine guns mounted on their roofs, exhausted-looking and dirty men standing behind them. Coming back to Evan, he nodded and pointed to the trailer on his right. "Bring 'em on up and park over there. It's dorm style. Find an empty spot and claim it. Showers are all yours. Dinner's at eighteen hundred hours, forty minutes from now. Think your men can make it?"

Evan tamped down a smile. "Nobody better stand in their way, sir."

"Nobody's gonna." Allstrong cocked his head. "Well, get 'em started, then."

It had come to darkness outside through the windows, but even inside, the noise never seemed to end. Planes took off and landed at all times. Beyond that constant barrage of white noise, Evan was aware of the hum of generators and the barking of dogs.

He'd gotten his men fed and settled and now he sat in a canvas-backed director's chair in the spacious double-wide room at the end of a trailer that served as one of Allstrong's personal offices. His gaze went to the walls, one of which was filled with a large map. On the other, commendation and service plaques, along with half a dozen photographs with recognizable politicians, attested to what must have been Allstrong's illustrious military career-his host had been Delta Force, finally mustering out as a full-bird colonel in the Army. He'd received two Purple Hearts and the Distinguished Service Cross. No sign of marriage or family.

Evan, taking Allstrong's measure as he pulled a bottle of Glenfiddich from what appeared to be a full case of the stuff behind his desk, put his age as late thirties. He had an open face and smiled easily, although the mouth and eyes didn't seem in perfect sync with one another. The eyes tended to dart, as though Allstrong was assessing his surroundings at all times. Which, now that Evan thought of it, probably made sense after a lifetime in theaters of war. Allstrong wore what he'd been wearing when they'd met outside-combat boots, camo pants, a black turtleneck. He free-poured a stiff shot into a clear plastic cup, handed it over to Evan, and splashed a couple of inches into a cup of his own. Pulling another director's chair over, he sat down. "Don't bullshit a bullshitter," he said.

"It's not bullshit," Evan said. "They weren't expecting us."

"Two hundred and ninety-seven men and they didn't know you were coming?"

"That's correct."

"So what did you do? What did they do?"

"They had us camp just about on the tarmac at a holding station in Kuwait. We had all our gear with us. They put us on the ground until they figured out what we were here for."

Allstrong shook his head, either in admiration or disbelief. "I love this glorious Army," he said. "Who's the commander down there? Still Bingham?"

"That was the name."

"So you're telling me they had you weekend warriors running your asses off stateside-hustling you out of your day jobs, rushing you through training-then packed you up in a 737, flew nonstop for twenty-two hours, Travis to Kuwait-and it's all hurry up! move it! we need you over here!-and you get here and nobody knows you're coming?"

"That's right."

"So what'd they do?"

"You know Camp Victory?" This was a sand-swept safe zone five miles north of Kuwait City where the Army had erected five enormous tents to hold overflow troops.

" Camp Victory!" Allstrong barked a laugh. "That kills me!" He drank off some scotch, coughed, shook his head. "And I thought I'd heard it all. How long before they found out who you were?"

"We camped there for a week."

"Christ. A week. So how'd you wind up here? What happened to the rest of your unit?"

Evan took a good hit of his own drink. For a few months after he'd graduated from college, he'd put away a lot of beer, but since joining the police force a few years ago, he'd been at most a light social drinker. Here and now, though, his first sip of real alcohol, though technically forbidden while he was on duty (always), seemed appropriate and even earned. "I don't know," he said. "Most of 'em are probably still back in Kuwait, working on the HETs they eventually found." These were the heavy-equipment transporters that hauled 2¹/2-to 5-ton cargo trucks and other massive ordnance and equipment from the Iraqi or Kuwaiti air bases where they'd been delivered to where they were supposed to get used in the field. Evan's National Guard unit, the 2632d Transportation Company out of San Bruno, California, was actually a medium transportation unit that had been trained to move troops and equipment.

"So what happened to you guys? The nine of you."

The drink was kicking in quickly. Evan felt his body relaxing and leaned back into his chair, crossing one leg over the other. "Well, that was just dumb or bad luck, one of the two. Once Bingham found the fleet of HETs, it turned out most of 'em didn't work. Heat, sand, four months without maintenance, you name it. So about half the guys got assigned to repair-and-rebuild work, and Bingham farmed out the rest of us wherever he needed somebody. I was a cop back home, and prior service enlisted with the infantry, plus I was the only guy with any crew-served-weapons experience, so Bingham had a convoy going to Baghdad and me and my men got assigned gun-truck support."

"So your other guys, they're cops too?"

"No. I'm the only cop, and the only one trained on the M60, if you don't count the forty-five minutes of instruction we all got before they sent us out."

"Now you are shitting me."

Evan held up three fingers. "Scout's honor."

"Jesus," Allstrong said. "So where do you guys stand now?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what's your mission? What are you doing tomorrow, for example?"

Evan sipped his scotch, shrugged his shoulders. "No clue. I check in with Colonel Calliston tomorrow morning at oh eight hundred and find out, I suppose. I don't see him sending us back to our unit, although that's what I'm going to request. The men aren't too hot on this convoy duty, maybe wind up getting shot at. That wasn't in the original plan."

A small knowing chuckle came from Allstrong's throat. "Well, Lieutenant, welcome to the war. Plans are what you work with before you get there. They give you the illusion you've got some control, and you don't."

"I'm getting a sense of that," Evan replied. "So the short answer is I don't know what's happening tomorrow, or next week, or anything. We seem to be the lost company."

Allstrong stood up with his drink and walked over to the map. Staring at it for a few seconds, he spoke back over his shoulder. "Maybe I can talk to Bill. Calliston. Get you and your men assigned to us. How'd you like that?"

"Staying on here?"

"Yeah."

"Doing what?"

Allstrong turned. "Well, that's the bad news. We'd want you to support our own convoy trucks, but there's a lot fewer of them and we're not afraid to drive faster if we need to."

"Where to?"

"Mostly Baghdad and back, but we're hoping to open offices at other bases near Fallujah and Mosul too. Wherever we can get work and beat damn Custer Battles to the punch."

"Custer Battles?"

"New guys. Contractors like us and kicking ass at it. They got the other half of this airport gig and they're going for everything else we are. I'm thinking of having their people killed." Evan nearly choked on his drink as Allstrong came forward with a laugh. "That's a joke, Lieutenant, or mostly a joke. Anyway, as you might have noticed, we're staffing up here. In a couple of months, this place will be hopping. Calliston's going to want to assign us some protection in any event. I figured you guys are already here. It's a good fit. Besides, over time, it's only going to get safer here, I mean the road between Baghdad and BIAP."

"You mean, the one known as RPG Alley?"

Allstrong smiled. "You heard that one already, huh?"

"Rocket-propelled-grenade alley just doesn't sound all that safe."

"It's going to get better."

Evan wasn't about to argue with his host. "You guys don't do your own security?" he asked. "I thought guys like you were guarding Bremer." This was L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, who had set up headquarters to administrate infrastructure and the economy and all nonmilitary aspects of the occupation in Hussein's Republican Palace in Baghdad a couple of weeks before.

Allstrong chortled again. "Yeah. True. Another absurd moment. Guys like us protect civilians and admin staff, but we're not supposed to carry heavy arms, so the military needs to guard our convoys."

"That's beautiful."

"Isn't it? Anyway, if you're interested, I could put in a call to Bill. At least get you guys attached here. Call it a short-term home."

"That might be a start to belonging somewhere," Evan said. "Sure. Call him."

2

"Route Irish" from the airport to Baghdad proper was a thoroughly modern freeway, three well-maintained lanes in each direction. From Evan's perspective, the main difference between it and an American freeway, aside from the apparently near-standard practice of driving the wrong way on any given lane, was that from many places cars could enter it anywhere from either side-the asphalt ended on a sand shoulder that usually proceeded without a demarcating fence or barrier of any kind out across an expanse of flat, marginal farmland. So once you got away from Baghdad, where on-and off-ramps and bridges were more common, traffic could and did enter the roadway willy-nilly and not necessarily at designated entrances and exits.

This became a major problem because of suicide car-bombers. In the four days since Colonel Calliston had attached Evan's unit to Allstrong, they hadn't gotten approached by any of these yet, but the threat was real and ubiquitous. On his way through Baghdad this morning, Evan had counted four burnt-out hulks of twisted metal, one of them still smoldering as he drove by after an hour's delay while the powers that be stopped all traffic and cleared the road.

Today his assignment was to pass through Baghdad and proceed up to Balad Air Base, nicknamed Anaconda, about forty miles north of the capital city, and pick up a man named Ron Nolan, a senior official with Allstrong who'd been scouting potential air bases to the north and west for the past week, assessing contracting opportunities. After collecting Nolan, they were to proceed back to downtown Baghdad and make a stop at the CPA headquarters for some unspecified business, then return to BIAP by nightfall.

The round-trip distance was give or take a hundred miles and they had about twelve hours of daylight, but Evan wasn't taking any chances. Movement Control had signed off on his convoy clearance and he had his full package-the three Humvees-out and rolling at oh dark thirty hours. Each of his Humvees had a driver and an assistant driver, who was also in charge of feeding ammunition to the gunner, whose body remained half-exposed through the hole in the car's roof. The heavily armed men alternated roles on successive trips. Evan could have claimed rank and never taken a turn as gunner-as a lieutenant his official role was to be convoy commander, or radio operator-but he made it a point to ride in each car and take a turn at the crew-serve weapon as the opportunity arose.

Today he rode as a passenger in the lead vehicle, in one of the two back seats. Because of the traffic delay, the package didn't pass Baghdad until eight o'clock and didn't make it the forty farther miles to the outer periphery of the enormous Anaconda base-soon to be named "Mortaritaville"-until eleven-fifteen. Even without car bombs, traffic on the road to the main logistics supply area close to Baghdad crept at a near standstill, not too surprising considering the sixteen thousand flights per month that Anaconda was handling.

When they got through the gate, Evan's driver and the second-in-command of their unit, Sergeant Marshawn Whitman, drove for a half mile or so through a city of tents and trailers before they came to an intersection with a sign indicating that the camp headquarters was a mile farther on their right. But Whitman didn't turn the car immediately. Instead, his window down, he stared out to his left at two of the corner tents, one sporting a logo for Burger King and the other for Pizza Hut. "Am I really seeing this, sir? Aren't we in a war here? Didn't we just make it into Baghdad, like, two months ago? Can I get out and grab a quick Whopper?"

When Evan shook Ron Nolan's hand just outside the headquarters tent, he had an immediate impression of great strength held in check. He went about five ten and came across as solid muscle, shoulders down to hips. Square jaw under brush-cut light hair. Today he wore a sidearm at his belt and a regular Army camo vest with Kevlar inserts over his khaki shirt. "Leff-tenant," Nolan boomed, pronouncing the word in the British manner and smiling wide as he fell in next to Evan, "I sure do appreciate the punctuality. Time is money, after all, and never more than right here and right now. I trust the limo's got good air-conditioning."

Evan slowed, jerked his head sideways. "Uh, sir…"

But with another booming laugh, Nolan slapped him on the back. "Joking with you, son. No worries. Ain't no part of a Humvee don't feel like home to me. You know we're planning to stop off in Baghdad?"

"Those are my orders, yes, sir."

Nolan stopped, reaching out a hand, laying it on Evan's arm. "At ease, Lieutenant," he said. "You a little nervous?"

"I'm fine, sir. But I'd be lying if I said Baghdad was my favorite place."

"Well, we won't be there for long if I can help it, and I think I can. Jack Allstrong's a master at keeping doors open." He paused for a second. "So. You regular Army?"

"No, sir. California National Guard."

"Yeah. I heard they were doing that. How big's your convoy?"

"Three Humvees, sir." They were approaching it now, parked just off the pavement. "Here they are."

Nolan stopped, hands on hips, and looked over the vehicles, bristling with weaponry. "Damn," he said to Evan, "that's a good-looking hunk of machinery." Nodding at Corporal Alan Reese, a former seventh-grade teacher now manning the machine gun on the closest Humvee, he called up to him. "How you doing, son?"

"Good, sir."

"Where you from back home?"

"San Carlos, California, sir."

"San Carlos!" Nolan's voice thundered. "I grew up right next door in Redwood City!" He slapped the bumper of the vehicle. "You believe this small world, Lieutenant? This guy and me, we're neighbors back home."

"We all are," Evan said, sharing the enthusiasm although he couldn't exactly say why. "Our unit's out of San Bruno. The nine of us, we're all Peninsula guys."

"Son of a bitch!" Nolan crowed. "I got hooked up with the right people here, that's for damn sure. How long have you guys been over here?"

"Going on three weeks," Evan said.

"Get shot at yet?"

"Not yet."

"Don't worry about it," Nolan said with a grin, "you will."

For an obscure and possibly impenetrable reason, they got routed through the mixed neighborhood of Mansour by Haifa Street rather than through the military-only secure road they normally took when coming in to CPA headquarters from BIAP. Ron Nolan's destination was Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace in central Baghdad, and the line of traffic on Haifa waiting outside the checkpoint to get into the Green Zone-bumper to bumper with weapons off-safe, ready to react-stopped them cold. Nolan extricated himself from his seat and opened his door, stepping out into the street and stretching. Evan, loath to let his passenger out of his sight, overcame his own reluctance-Iraqi civilians were all over the street, any one of them possibly an armed insurgent-and got out as well.

It was late afternoon by now, sweltering hot with nary a freshening breeze. The air was heavy with the smells of roasting meat and fish, manure, oil, and garbage. Haifa Street was wide and lined with three-and four-story concrete buildings, most with at least some of their windows blown out. From the crowd on the sidewalks, including women and children, no one would conclude that they were in a war zone, though. Merchants had lined up where most of the traffic into the Green Zone had to pass, and the street had the air of a bazaar-makeshift stands sold everything from clothing to batteries, toilet paper to money to candy.

Nolan, taking it in, seemed to be enjoying it all. Finally, he caught Evan's eye and grinned over the hood of the car. "We can make it in half the time if we walk. You up for it?"

Evan, reluctant to leave his troops, would have much preferred the relative security of his Humvee, but he also had a responsibility to protect Ron Nolan and get him back to Allstrong, and if that meant braving the streets of Baghdad, this was something different he should do as well. The mutually exclusive options played across his features.

Nolan noticed the hesitation. "Come on, Lieutenant. No guts, no glory."

"Just thinking about my men, Mr. Nolan," Evan covered.

"Hey. If they get to the gate before we're done, have 'em pull over and we'll meet ' em there. But at this rate they won't even be there by the time we're through. And I'd like to make it back to BIAP before dark."

Their Humvee moved forward about six feet and stopped again.

"Either way," Nolan said, "I'm going. You with me?"

"Sure." Evan leaned inside the passenger window and told Marshawn what he was doing.

"I don't like being out of contact," his driver replied.

"I don't either, Marsh. This is all new to me too." He indicated their passenger with a toss of his chin. "But he's going. And things here look pretty calm."

"Yeah," Marshawn said, "the 'before' shot."

They both knew that he meant "before the bomb exploded in the crowded marketplace."

"Let's hope not," Evan said. "And the sooner we get done and leave Baghdad, the sooner we're back home."

"I'm not arguing, sir. If you got to go, you got to go. But what if you're not at the gate? What are we supposed to do? Where will you be?"

For an answer, Evan shrugged and held up his portable Motorola radio, which was good for about a mile. Nolan, who'd heard the exchange, leaned back to Marshawn. "Budget office, down in the basement of the headquarters building. You can't miss it. But a hundred bucks says we beat you back to the gate."

The traffic gave and Marshawn crept forward another five or six feet before stopping again. The line of cars stretched for at least a quarter mile in front of him. "That's a bad bet for me, sir," he said, "even if I had the hundred bucks."

"I think so, too, Sergeant. That's why we're walking." Nolan snapped his fingers, remembering something, and reopened his back door. Reaching in, he emerged a second later with his backpack, apparently empty. "Can't forget this," he said with another grin, and strapped it onto his back, over the Kevlar vest.

Ron Nolan waited for Evan to fall in next to him, then said, "And by the way, my name's Ron, okay? Mr. Nolan's my dad. You okay with Evan?"

"That's my name."

"Yeah, well, Evan, I didn't mean to put you on the spot back there with your men, and I apologize. But you can't afford to be tentative here. You've got to make decisions and run on 'em. That's the main thing about this place."

"I just made my decision. But I'm not sure that leaving my convoy was the right one. We've had it drilled into us that procedures are crucial to maintain order."

They were walking shoulder to shoulder at the curb. Nolan shook his head, disagreeing. "My experience says it's more important to trust your gut. And I'm not talking just about deciding in a split second who's a Muj and who's a Hajj"-these were the Mujahideen and the Hajji, the bad guys and the good guys, respectively-"which is life and death and I mean right now. But the business environment here…Christ, what a gold mine! But you've got to see the opportunity and jump, and I'm talking like yesterday, or it all goes away. Did you get a chance to talk to Jack Allstrong at all back at BIAP?"

"A little bit."

"He tell you how he got the airport gig? The one that got us on the boards?"

"No. He never mentioned it."

"Well, it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. You know what our half of that contract's worth? If you guess sixteen million dollars, you're on it."

"To do what? I saw the trailers, but it wasn't clear what you guys were doing there."

"We're guarding the airport, that's what."

"What about us?"

"What do you mean, us?"

"I mean the military, the Army, the Marines. What about us? We're not guarding the airport?"

"No. You're fighting the insurgents-most of the regular units, anyway. Jerry Bremer, God love him, in his wisdom fired all the Iraqi police and disbanded the military, so nobody's left over here except us contractors to provide security for the people who are coming in droves to do oversight and infrastructure, which is, like, everybody else."

Evan had his hand on the weapon in the holster on his hip. Most of the local people in the street and on the sidewalk were simply stepping out of the way as the two Americans passed by, but many of the children were smiling and jogging along with them-Evan had already learned, along with the Iraqi kids, that U.S. servicemen were a common source of candy from their MRE kits. But Evan had no candy on him and he wanted to get inside the Green Zone as fast as he could, so he kept pressing through the crowd.

Meanwhile, Ron Nolan kept up the patter. "Jack really hadn't been doing too good after he cashiered out. He'd been trying to set up a security business in San Fran, looking into water supply issues and the whole domestic terrorist thing, but it wasn't going very well. So then Baghdad falls, and what did Jack do? Same thing as Mike Battles with Custer Battles. He hopped on a plane with his last couple hundred bucks and flew over here to suss the place out for business opportunities." Nolan spread his arms theatrically. "Et voilà! Couple of months later, sixteen million smackeroos."

"Just like that?"

"Almost. Jack still knew a few guys from when he'd been in, and they turned him on to the airport gig and talked the guy in charge into letting Jack bid on it."

"But how'd he get it?" In spite of himself, Evan found himself taken by the narrative, and by Nolan's enthusiasm. "I mean, I'm assuming he's bidding against the giants, right? Halliburton, Blackwater, KBR." KBR was Kellogg, Brown, and Root. Unbeknownst to Evan, KBR was itself a subsidiary of Halliburton, not truly a separate entity.

"Yep. And don't forget DynCorp and ArmorGroup International. The big boys. To say nothing of Custer Battles-actually, they gave us the toughest run for it. But Jack wrestled 'em down and pulled out half the gig." Even in the madness of Baghdad 's afternoon market, Nolan beamed at the memory.

"So what did he offer?"

"Well, first, a low bid, but that was basically because he was clueless and didn't know what it was worth. But the main thing was time. He promised to have almost a hundred and fifty men on the ground out here within two weeks."

"Two weeks?"

"Two weeks."

They walked on for a few more steps, before Evan couldn't help himself. "How was he going to do that? What was he going to pay them with? In fact, who was he going to hire? Did you guys have a hundred and fifty employees in San Francisco you could fly out here?"

Nolan howled out a laugh. "Are you kidding? He had three employees in San Francisco. And he'd paid them off of his credit cards in June. It was the end of the road for him if this didn't work. But it did."

"How'd that happen?"

They'd come almost to the checkpoint while the traffic hadn't budged, and Nolan stopped and faced Evan. "That's the great part. Jack didn't have any more credit. Nobody would lend him any more money back home, so he flew back here and convinced the CPA that they needed to lend him two million dollars against his first payment on the contract."

"Two million dollars?"

"In cash," Nolan said. "In new hundred dollar bills. So Jack packed 'em all up in a suitcase and flew to Jerusalem, where he deposited it all in the bank, then called me and told me to get my ass over here. He was in business."

At the gate, in spite of the crowd pressing up to get admitted, Nolan flashed his creds and the two men breezed their way through the CPA checkpoint-even the grunt guards seemed to know who he was. He and Evan crossed an enormous, open, tank-studded courtyard-at least a couple of hundred yards on a side-that fronted a grandiose white palacelike structure that, up close, bore silent witness to the bombardment that had rained upon the city in the past months-windows still blown out, the walls pocked with craters from shells, bullets, and shrapnel.

Inside the main building, in the enormous open lobby, pandemonium reigned. In a Babel of tongues, military uniforms mingled with business suits and dishdashas as half a thousand men jostled and shoved for position in one of the lines. Each line wended its way to one of the makeshift folding tables that apparently controlled access to the inner sanctum of Bremer and his senior staff. The noise, the intensity, the hundred-plus temperature, and the general stench of humanity assaulted Evan's senses as soon as he passed through the front door.

To all appearances, Nolan was immune to all of it. He hadn't gone three steps into the lobby when he plucked Evan's sleeve and pointed to their right. So they hugged the back wall, skirting most of the madness and making progress toward a wide marble staircase that led down. The crowd on the stairs was far less dense here than in the room behind them.

"What's all that about?" Evan asked as soon as he could be heard.

Nolan stopped at the bottom step. "Those folks," he said, "are basically the ones who got here a day late and a dollar short. I'd say they're Jack's competitors, except most of 'em are angling for subcontracts with the big boys. Basically, the entire country's for sale and Bremer's trying to administer all the deals from this building, from those tables, each of which represents a different ministry, if you can believe that. Seventeen, twenty of 'em. I don't know. And with, as maybe you can see, mixed results. Everybody wants a piece. Thank Christ we're beyond that stage. Fucking bedlam, isn't it?"

But he didn't wait for an answer. Turning, Nolan continued along the wall, Evan tagging behind him, the crowd gradually thinning around them the farther they went along the hallway. After thirty yards or so, finally, they turned a corner. Another long corridor stretched out before them, startlingly untraveled. A man in a military uniform sat at a lone table a little more than midway along, and three other men, apparently civilians, stood in front of him. But otherwise the hallway was empty. The noise and craziness behind them still echoed, but suddenly Evan felt psychically removed from it in spite of the fact that there was still a terrible odor of human waste and-even with holes where the windows should have been-no ventilation.

Nolan never slowed down. If anything, checking his watch, he glanced up at the window openings high in the wall and speeded up. But as they approached the desk, he put out a hand to stop their progress and swore.

"What's up?" Evan asked.

Nolan swore again and came to a dead stop. "It would be Charlie Tucker when we're in a hurry. Maybe your sergeant should've taken my hundred-dollar bet."

"Who is he?"

"He's a twerp. Senior Auditor for Aviation Issues. I think back home he was a librarian. Here, he's a bean counter, but mostly he's a pain in the ass for people like Jack and me who are actually trying to do some good and make things happen." But Evan was starting to understand that Nolan wasn't the type of guy to brood about stuff like Charlie Tucker or anything else. He pasted on a brave smile. "But hey," he said, "that's why they pay us the big bucks, right? We get it done."

In the short time it took them to walk to the desk, Major Tucker had processed one of the three men who'd been standing in front of his desk. As Nolan got closer, the man in the back of the line turned and took a step toward them and bowed slightly. "Mr. Nolan," he said in accented English, "how are you, sir?"

"Kuvan!" From the apparently genuine enthusiasm, Kuvan might have been Nolan's best friend from childhood. Kuvan seemed to be in his early thirties. The face was light-skinned, bisected by a prominent hooked nose, and featured the usual Iraqi mustache. Nolan came up to him, arms extended, grabbed him by both shoulders, and the two men seemed to rub noses with one another. They then exchanged what Evan had already come to recognize as the standard Muslim praises to the Prophet, after which Nolan continued. "Kuvan Krekar, this here is Second Lieutenant Evan Scholler, California Army National Guard. He's only been here a few weeks and I'm trying to make him feel at home." Then, to Evan: "Kuvan helped us with some of our Filipino personnel down at BIAP. He's a genius at finding people who want to work."

As Krekar put out a hand and offered Evan a firm and powerful grip, he smiled and said, "All people treasure the nobility of work. If everyone had a job, there would be no war."

"Then I'd be out of a job," Evan said, surprising himself.

Krekar took the comment in stride, his smile never wavering. "But not for long, I'd wager. Even my friend Mr. Nolan here, a professional soldier of some renown, has found meaningful work in the private sector. In any event, welcome to my country, Lieutenant. You're in good hands with Mr. Nolan."

"I'm getting that impression," Evan said.

Krekar brought his smile back to Nolan. "One hears rumors that Mr. Allstrong is going to be bidding on the currency project."

This was the contract to replace Iraq 's old currency, thirteen thousand tons of paper that featured the face of Saddam Hussein on every bill, with one of a new design. Twenty-four hundred tons of new dinars would have to be distributed in under three months. This would involve hundreds of Iraqis in all parts of the country, all of whom would need to be housed and fed in new camps with new infrastructure and Internet services at Mosul, Basra, and many other sites-exactly the kind of work Allstrong was doing now at Baghdad Airport. It would also involve supplying a fleet of five-ton trucks to carry the people and the money.

"It's entirely possible," Nolan said. "Although I haven't talked to Jack in a couple of weeks. And you know, here a couple of weeks the world can change."

"Well, when you do see him," Krekar said, "please mention my name to him. The paper and pressing plants as well as the design elements and the banking issues-I know some people with these skills and perhaps Jack and I could reach an arrangement, if Allah is willing."

"I'll be sure to let him know, Kuvan. If he's bidding at all, that is."

Behind them, Tucker cleared his throat. Krekar bowed a hasty good-bye to Nolan and Evan and then stepped up to the desk.

Backing up a couple of feet, bringing Evan with him, Nolan spoke sotto voce, "Talk about getting it done. If Kuvan's with us on this currency thing, we're going to lock it up. Taking nothing away from Jack's accomplishment, without Kuvan we don't have the airport, and that's no exaggeration."

"What'd he do?"

"Well, you know I told you it was all about getting a lot of feet on the ground here in a couple of weeks. Jack promised he could do it, and the CPA believed him-he's a persuasive guy. But still, push came to shove and Custer Battles was beating us getting guys to work for them at every turn. Jack had no idea where he was going to find guards and cooks and all the other bodies he was going to need. So, it turns out that one of Jack's old Delta buddies does security for KBR, and he turns him on to Kuvan, who's connected to this endless string of mules-Nepalese, Jordanians, Turks, Filipinos, you name it. You give these guys a buck an hour, they'll do anything for you-cook, clean, kill somebody…"

"A buck an hour? Is that what they're making?"

"Give or take, for the cooks and staff. Guards maybe two hundred a month." Nolan lowered his voice even further, gestured toward the desk. "But don't let Tucker hear that. Jack bid it out at around twenty an hour per man, but as I say, Kuvan's a genius. His fee is two bucks an hour, which takes our cost up to three an hour, so we're hauling in seventeen. That's per hour, twenty-four seven, times a hundred and sixty guys so far, with another two hundred in the pipeline. And the more we bring on, the more we make. Like I told you, you play it right, this place is a gold mine. How much they paying you, Evan, two grand a month?"

"Close. Plus hazard duty…"

Nolan cut him off with a laugh. "Hazard duty, what's that, a hundred fifty a month? That's what our cooks make."

"Yeah, you mentioned that." The news disturbed Evan-a hundred and fifty dollars extra per month and he faced death every day.

After a little pause, Nolan looked at him sideways. "You know what I'm making?"

"No idea."

"You want to know?"

A nod. "Sure."

"Twenty thousand a month. That's tax-free, by the way. Of course, I've got lots of experience and there's a premium on guys like me. But still, guys like you can finish up here, then turn around and come back a month later with any of us contractors, and you're looking at ten grand minimum a month. A six-month tour and you're back home, loaded. This thing lasts long enough, the smart-money bet by the way, and I go home a millionaire."

Up at the desk, Major Charles Tucker looked like he could use some time in the sun. He'd sweated through his shirt. He sported rimless glasses, had a high forehead, and nearly invisible blond eyebrows-a caricature of the harried accountant. And he made no secret of his disdain for Nolan. "Let's see your paperwork. Who signed off on it this time?"

"Colonel Ramsdale, sir. Air-base Security Services Coordinator."

"Another one of Mr. Allstrong's friends?"

"A comrade-in-arms. Yes, sir. They were in Desert Storm together."

"I'm happy for them." Tucker looked down at the sheets of paper Nolan had handed him. He flipped the first page, studied the second, went back to the first.

"Everything in order, sir?" Nolan asked with an ironic obsequiousness.

"This is a lot of money to take away in cash, Nolan." He gestured to Evan. "Who's this guy?"

"Convoy support, sir. Protection back to the base."

Tucker went back to the papers. "Okay, I can see the payroll, but what's this sixty-thousand-dollar add-on for"-he squinted down at the paper-"does this say dogs?"

"Yes, sir. Bomb-sniffing dogs, which we need to feed and build kennels for, along with their trainers and handlers."

"And Ramsdale approved this?"

"Apparently so, sir." Nolan leaned down and pretended to be looking for Ramsdale's signature. Evan stifled a smile. Nolan, punctiliously polite, somehow managed to put a bit of the needle into every exchange.

"I'm going to have somebody in audit verify this."

Nolan shrugged. "Of course, sir."

"Sixty thousand dollars for a bunch of dogs!"

"Bomb-sniffing dogs, sir." Nolan remained mild. "And the infrastructure associated with them."

But apparently there was nothing Tucker could do about it. Nolan had his form in order and it was signed by one of the Army's sanctioned pay-masters. He scribbled something on the bottom of the form. Then he looked up. Behind Nolan, the line had grown again to four or five other customers. "Specie?" Tucker said.

"I beg your pardon," Nolan replied.

"Don't fuck with me, Nolan. Dollars or dinars?"

"I think dollars."

"Yes. I thought you would think that. You're paying your people in dollars?"

"That's all they'll take, sir. The old dinar's a little shaky right now."

Tucker made another note, tore off his duplicate copy, and put it in his top right-hand drawer. "This is going to audit," he repeated, then looked around Nolan and said, "Next!"

3

That night in his trailer's office, Jack Allstrong sipped scotch with Ron Nolan while they tossed a plastic-wrapped bundle of five hundred hundred-dollar bills-fifty thousand dollars-back and forth, playing catch. Allstrong's office, nice at it was, remained a sore point with him. This was because the main office of his chief competitor, Custer Battles ("CB"), was in one of the newly reburbished terminals. When Mike Battles had first gotten here two months before, he found that he'd inherited several empty shells of airport terminal buildings, littered with glass, concrete, rebar, garbage, and human waste. He had cleaned the place up, carpeted the floors, wallpapered (all of his supplies bought and shipped from the United States), put showers in the bathrooms, and hooked the place up to a wireless Internet connection.

At about the same time, Jack Allstrong had had to start work on his trailer park to house his guards and cooks, although he still couldn't compete with such CB amenities as a swimming pool and a rec room with a pool table. Allstrong knew that these types of cosmetics would be important to help convince his clients that he was serious and committed to the long-term success of the mission, but he was initially hampered by lack of infrastructure and simple good help.

But then that genius Kuvan Krekar had come up with the idea of dog kennels as another income source, and that was already working. Allstrong now had a decent number of the ministry people starting to believe that IED-and bomb-sniffing dogs would be an essential part of the rebuilding process in bases all over the country.

So all in all, Jack was in high spirits for a variety of reasons: Kuvan was in fact interested in going in with them on their currency-exchange bid, which gave it immediate credibility and might make them the front runners over CB; the CPA was still paying them in dollars (which meant Allstrong could buy his own dinars to pay his local workers at the deeply discounted black-market exchange rate); the bomb-sniffing-dog revenue wasn't going to be stopped, at least in the short term, by bureaucrats like Charlie Tucker.

The bottom line was that the two million dollars in cash that Nolan had retrieved today and carried here in his backpack covered approximately four hundred thousand dollars in the company's actual current expenses, including tips to Colonel Ramsdale and several other middlemen. Everyone was too busy and/or too afraid and the times were too chaotic for anyone to bother keeping close tabs on exactly what the money was used for, or exactly where it went. There was plenty of it, in cash, and the mandate was to get Iraq up and running again. Subtext: whatever it cost.

For example, in the first month of the contract, Allstrong's trailer park had run out of drinking water within a week, a true crisis. Jack had gone to Ramsdale and told him he desperately needed to buy more water immediately, but that he was out of money, what with payroll, housing costs, legitimate security equipment, weapons, and vehicles such as armored Mercedes-Benz sedans, and all other daily supplies for his now close to 150-man staff. Without a personal look at the situation and apparently without a qualm, Ramsdale signed off on an authorization for Allstrong to add six hundred thousand dollars to the original sixteen-million-dollar contract over its six-month life-peanuts considering the fact that the contract as written already was paying Allstrong a little bit more than eighty-eight thousand dollars a day, all of it in cash.

Allstrong had requested a total of a hundred thousand dollars from Ramsdale for the water, but the colonel had been so used to thinking in one-month units that he'd okayed six times the requested price, and Allstrong had seen no reason to correct him. And after all, the truth was that they were all working in an extremely hostile environment, where the danger of death was real and omnipresent. In Allstrong's view, that risk should not go without significant reward, even if much of it turned out to be under the table. It wasn't as though people like Ramsdale didn't know what was happening. In fact, Ramsdale was planning to retire from the active military before the year was out, and he'd already made a commitment to stay on in Iraq as one of Allstrong's senior security analysts at a salary of $240,000 per year.

Standing over by his wall map, Allstrong caught the latest toss of the packet of bills from Nolan and turned it over in his hands. "So." It wasn't a question. It wasn't an answer. The tone seemed to say, I'm holding on to fifty thousand dollars in cash, when last year I was flat broke. He smiled. "How sweet is this, huh, Ron?"

"Yes, sir." Nolan tipped up his scotch. "It's turning out to be a good year."

"Yes, it is." Allstrong crossed over to his desk, casually flipping the wrapped bills package over to Nolan. "And I think it could be even better, but I'm leery of burning out my best assets, which are men like you. No, no, no, don't give me any of that false modesty bullshit. I send you out to do a job and you get the job done. It's not every guy in the world can walk around with two million dollars and not be tempted to disappear with it."

This was more than just idle chatter. That exact temptation, though for far less money-a quarter of a million dollars-had proven too strong for at least one of Allstrong's other senior employees in the past two months. Beyond that, almost two dozen of his first crew of guard hires-from pre-Kuvan sources-had disappeared with guns and credentials almost as soon as they'd been issued them.

But Ron Nolan merely shrugged. "You pay me well, Jack. I like the work. It's nice to get a regular paycheck. Beyond which"-he broke his own smile-"I disappear with two million of your money, I'm pretty sure you'd hunt me down and kill me."

Allstrong pointed a finger at him. "You're not all wrong there. Nothing personal."

"No, of course not."

Allstrong put a haunch on the corner of his desk. "What I'm getting at is whether you're starting to feel stretched a little thin."

"No, I'm good."

"I ask because another opportunity has come up-I know, they're growing on trees nowadays, but if I don't pick 'em somebody else will. Anyway, I wanted to run it by you, see if you wanted to take point on it. I should tell you, I consider it pretty high risk, even for here."

"Taking a walk over here is high risk, Jack."

"Yes, it is. But this is in the Sunni Triangle."

Nolan tossed the package up and caught it. He shrugged. "What's the gig?"

"Pacific Safety-Rick Slocum's outfit, he's tight with Rumsfeld-just pulled in a contract through the Corps of Engineers to rewire the whole goddamn Triangle in three months. High-voltage wiring and all the towers to hold it. You ready for this? He's going to need seven hundred guards for his people."

Nolan whistled. "Seven hundred?"

"I know. A shitload. But I'm sure Kuvan can get 'em."

"I'm sure he can too. You gotta love them Kurds."

"Who doesn't? So…you want to hear the numbers?"

"Sure," Nolan said. "I haven't had a good hard-on in a couple of days." With the wrapped bills in one hand and his tumbler of scotch in the other, he got up and crossed over to Allstrong's desk.

His boss pulled over the adding machine and started punching and talking. "Let's assume two hundred a month for the guards, what we're paying now. Good? We've got seven hundred guys working for ninety days, that's four hundred twenty thousand. Plus food and ammo and other incidentals. Let's go wild and call that twenty bucks a man per day, so forty-two grand. Shooting high, call our whole expense five hundred grand. Slocum told me off the record that because of the high risk in the area, he expects the winning bid to come in at no less than twelve mil. Which is exactly what I'm going to bid it at and which, if you're doing your math"-he hit the calculator-"is a three-month profit of eleven million five hundred thousand dollars."

"I've definitely got wood," Nolan said.

"So you're in if we get it?"

"All the way, Jack. We'd be crazy not to."

"I agree. But I'm not sugarcoating it. I'm thinking we might lose a dozen guys. I'm talking dead, not deserted or disappeared."

"Okay."

"There'd be a significant bonus in it for you. Twenty a month sound good?"

"When do I start?"

"First, let's get the gig. But remember, I want you to be sure you're good with it. You'll have your bare ass hanging out there."

"And seven hundred guys guarding it, Jack. Can I bring my escorts? I like that guy Scholler. He runs a tight ship."

"I'll talk to Calliston, but I can't imagine there'd be any problem. He doesn't even know who those guys are."

"Poor bastards."

"Hey," Allstrong said, "they enlisted. What'd they expect?" He went around his desk and stood looking out the window at the airport outside. An enormous C-17 Globemaster III transport plane coasted by on the tarmac-several hundred more tons of supplies and equipment direct from the United States. Without turning around, he said, "So between now and then, what's your schedule look like?"

"When exactly?"

"Next couple of weeks."

"Pretty free. I got the message out up at Anaconda and Tikrit. We've definitely got friends trying to hook us up in both places, but they've got to clear their own brass first. We might have to sub under KBR, but I got the sense they're generally open to us doing what we've done here. Whatever happens, it's going to take a little time. Why?"

Now Allstrong did turn. "I'd like to send you back to the States for a week or two. Clean up some problems in the home office. I'd go myself, but I don't feel like I can leave here just now if we want to pick up these jobs we're talking about. You'd be back in plenty of time for the Triangle thing if that comes about. And after today, payroll's covered until next time."

"What kind of problems?"

"Well." Allstrong tipped up the last of his scotch. "I hired a private eye and he's found Arnold Zwick. The idiot went back home to Frisco." Zwick was the company's senior executive who'd disappeared with a quarter million dollars of Allstrong's money about six weeks before. "I'd kind of like to get my money back. I was hoping you could talk some sense into him. After that, take a little well-deserved R and R wherever you want to go. Sound good?"

"When do you want me to leave?"

"I can get you on a plane to Travis tomorrow morning."

"Done."

Allstrong broke a smile. "You know, Ron, I hate it when you take so long to make your decisions."

"I know," Nolan said. "It's a flaw. I'm working on it."

At his desk, Allstrong picked up a manila envelope and handed it across to Nolan. "If what's in that doesn't answer all your questions, I'll brief you further in the morning. Now you'd better go do some packing."

"I'm gone."

Nolan executed a brisk salute and whirled around. His hand was on the doorknob when Allstrong spoke behind him.

"Aren't you forgetting something?"

Nolan straightened up and turned around as he pulled the packet of bills out from under his jacket. He was smiling. "Oh, you mean this old thing?" He tossed it back to his boss. "Just seeing if you're paying attention, Jack, keeping you on your toes."

"Pretty much always," Allstrong said.

"I can see that. Catch you in the morning."

Dear Tara-

So today I got to walk through some of the mean streets of scenic Baghdad with this crazy guy, Ron Nolan, who didn't seem to know or care that we were in hostile territory. He's one of the security guys for Allstrong, which, you may remember from my last letter, if you're reading them, is the contracting firm that we've somehow gotten semipermanently attached to. I find it ironic, to say the least, that I'm supposed to be out protecting him. This guy needs protection like a duck needs a raincoat.

It was too surreal. He's there to collect the company's payroll for this month. So I'm thinking we're going to go in someplace like a bank and get a check from Bremer's people that Allstrong can then go deposit in their bank. Wrong. They've got barbed wire and cement blocks set up in the hallway in front of this door. Nolan shows his ID to the Marine sergeant on duty with his whole platoon. The place is a fortress.

Anyway, we pass the ID check-everybody knows Nolan-and they walk us into this tiny internal room-no windows out to the hall, even. Stucco is still all over the floors from when the building was bombed in April. No drywall either. After Saddam left town, the looters came in and took everything, and I mean everything. Rebar out of the walls. Internal wiring. You wouldn't believe it. There's not a desk in the whole ministry building-everybody uses folding tables like you get at Wal-Mart. I wouldn't be surprised if we bought ' em from Wal-Mart and had 'em shipped over.

Anyway, so we're in this small, dim, dirty room. Four lightbulbs. It's roughly a hundred and fifty degrees in there. And there's these two guys who take Nolan's papers, check 'em over, then disappear into what looks like a warehouse behind them. Ten minutes later, they're back with a shopping cart full of packages of hundred-dollar bills.

I'm standing there thinking, They're kidding me, right? But they count out these forty wrapped bags of fifty thousand dollars each and-you won't believe this-Nolan signs off on the amount and together, counting them a second time, we load 'em all up into his backpack!

Picture this. Nolan's got two million American dollars in cash in a backpack he's wearing, and we're walking out through this mob of not very friendly people in the lobby of the Republican Palace, and then we're back outside the Green Zone, strolling through the impoverished Baghdad streets that are crawling with citizens who make less than a hundred dollars a month and who really don't like us. Was I a little nervous? Is this guy out of his mind, or what? And I got the sense he was loving it.

Long story short, a couple of blocks along through this really really crowded marketplace and finally we hooked back up with my guys in the convoy and made it out of town and back to the base here, where Jack Allstrong has supposedly got a huge safe-flown in from America, of course-bolted into the cement foundation under his office.

Anyway, lots more to tell about some of the other insane elements of the economics of this place-all the cooks here at the base are Filipinos, and the actual guards out at the airport are from Nepal. We met a guy named Kuvan today who evidently supplies Allstrong with all these workers. Nolan tells me none of them make more than a hundred and fifty bucks a month, where he makes twenty thousand! He tells me that when I get done with my service here, I should volunteer to come back and work for Allstrong. Ex-American military guys make out like bandits here. You'd love it if I went that way, huh?

Okay, enough about this place. You hear about Iraq enough anyway, I'm sure. What I'd really like to know is if you're reading any of these, if I'm at least communicating with you a little. It's hard you not answering, Tara. If you've gotten this far on this letter, and you don't want me to write to you anymore, just tell me somehow and I promise I'll stop. If you've made up your mind and it's completely over. But some part of me holds on to the hope that you might be willing to give us another try when I come home.

I know, as you said a hundred times, IF I get home. Well, here's the deal. I'm coming home.

I'm just having a hard time accepting that our slightly different politics have really broken us up. It's true that I think sometimes it's okay to fight for something, either because you believe in the cause or because you've signed on to fight. You've given your word. It's as simple as that. Maybe you don't think that, and we can argue about it more someday, I hope.

If you could just write me back, one way or the other, Tara, I'd love to hear from you. I love you. Still.

"Hey! Evan."

He looked up to see Ron Nolan standing in the doorway that led back to the dormitory where his men slept. He had written his letter sitting in muted light at a table in the otherwise empty mess hall. Now he'd just finished addressing his envelope and put his pen down, nodding in acknowledgment. "Sir."

Nolan stepped into the room. "Hey, haven't we already been over this? You're Evan, I'm Ron. What are you, twenty-five?"

"Twenty-seven."

"Well, I'm thirty-eight. Give me a break. You call me 'sir,' I feel old. I feel old, I get mean. I get mean, I kill people. Then you'd be to blame. It's a vicious circle and it would all be your fault."

The last words he'd written to Tara still with him, Evan had to force his face into a tolerant smile. "You'd just kill somebody at random?"

Nolan was up to the table by now, grinning. "It's been known to happen. It's not pretty. You want a beer?"

Evan had a nagging feeling that this recreational drinking could become a slippery slope. It would make the second time he'd had alcohol since his arrival over here. But then really, he thought, what the fuck. With everything else that was going on over here, who really cared? Nevertheless, he took a half-swing at reluctance. "We're not supposed to drink," he said.

"Oh, right, I forgot." Nolan cocked his head. "Are you fucking kidding me? Somebody here gonna bust you? You're in charge here, dude."

"I know. I'm thinking about my men."

"What's that, like a mantra with you? You see that in a movie or something? I don't see any of your guys around who are going to be scandalized. They won't even see. Don't be a dweeb. I'll get you a beer."

"One." Evan was talking to his back as he turned.

"Okay. For starters." Nolan walked back into the kitchen, opened an enormous double-doored refrigerator, and returned carrying two bottles of Budweiser. Twisting off the top of one, he slid it down the length of the table to where Evan stopped it and brought it to his lips. When he finished his first sip, Nolan was sitting across from him. "There's e-mail out here, you know." He pointed at the envelope. "Mom or girlfriend?"

"Ex-girlfriend. I e-mailed her all during training and she never answered. It's too goddamn easy to hit Delete. Or change your address. So now I write letters." He shrugged. "Stupid, but maybe some kind of physical connection."

"If she's your ex-girlfriend, why are you writing her?"

"I don't know. It's probably a waste of time. I'm an idiot." He took another pull at his beer. "I'd just like to know if she's even getting these damn letters."

"So that's not the first one?"

"It's like, the tenth."

"And she hasn't written back? Not even once?"

"It was a pretty bad fight. We disagreed about the war."

"People don't break up over that."

"We did." He looked across the table. "But then sometimes I think maybe something's happened to her. I can't believe she won't write me back. Maybe she's not getting them. If she's read 'em, I know she'd…maybe she died, or something happened and she can't…"

"Can't what?"

"I don't know."

Nolan spun his bottle slowly. "Dude," he said. "No offense, but you're sounding a little pathetic. Here you are laying your life on the line every day. You got bigger fish to fry."

"Yeah. I know." He slugged down a mouthful. "I know."

"You want to just give it up."

"If I heard from her, maybe it'd be easier."

"You are hearing from her. Think about it."

"Yeah, you're right. I know you're right." He tipped up his bottle and drained it.

Nolan got up and went back into the kitchen, returned with another round, twisted off Evan's cap, and passed it across to him as he sat down. "So where'd you go to school?"

" Santa Clara."

"College boy, huh?" At Evan's shrug, Nolan went on. "Hey, no crime in that. I went two years to Berkeley. Couldn't stand the place, though, so I went out and enlisted. Made the SEALs and life got good. You finish?"

"Yep."

"What'd you do after?"

"Became a cop."

Nolan cracked a grin and nodded. "I had a feeling you were a cop."

"Why's that?"

"You look like a cop."

"I know a lot of cops who don't look like me."

"You know what you're looking for, I bet they do." Nolan drank, his grin in place. "It's how you walk, how you carry yourself. You're a big guy. You keep yourself in good shape. I would have guessed a cop. Here's to good cops everywhere."

Nolan straightened up, raised a flat palm, and Evan reached up and slapped it hard enough that the clap rang in the empty room. Back down on his seat, Nolan raised his bottle and the two men clinked them together and drank them down in one long gulp.

When Nolan got back with the next round and they'd clinked again, he pointed down at the letter, still on the table between them. "You in touch with anybody else back home who can talk to her, find out what's happening?"

"Not really. This place isn't the best for communication, maybe you've noticed."

"You got family?"

"Yeah, but…what am I supposed to do? Ask my brother or my mother to go see if Tara 's okay? That'd just be weird. She'd think I was stalking her or something."

"Well." Nolan tipped up his beer again. "Here's the deal. I'm flying back to San Fran tomorrow. You give me that letter, I'll go put the damn thing right in her hand, ask her if she's read the other ones. Find out the story. Be back here in two weeks."

"You're going home. What for?"

He waved away the question. "Just some logistics stupidity for Jack. Office problems. Show a presence and make sure the staff is on board with the big picture. We get either one of these new contracts, we're going to need a new building back at home." He shrugged. "Business stuff. But the point is I'll have plenty of time to drive down to Redwood City. Suss out what's going on with your babe."

"Ex-babe."

"Whatever." He reached out and turned the envelope around, looked down, and read, "Tara Wheatley. Cute name anyway."

"Cute girl," Evan said.

"I believe you."

"You really wouldn't mind going down and giving her the envelope?"

Nolan spread his hands expansively. "Hey! Dude. Please. Forget about it. It's done."

4

Ron Nolan sat on the top step of the shaded outdoor stairway that led to the second landing at the Edgewood Apartments in Redwood City, California. The shade came courtesy of a brace of giant magnolia trees that stood sentinel over the entrance to the apartment complex.

An hour ago, at about five o'clock, he'd climbed the steps and rung the doorbell at 2C, but no one had answered. He could have called first and made an appointment-Tara Wheatley was listed in the phone book-but he thought it would be better if he just showed up and delivered the letter in person. He didn't want to give her the option of saying she wouldn't see him, didn't care if she ever got another letter from Evan. That would have complicated the whole thing. It was better to simply show up and complete the mission.

He wasn't in any hurry. He'd give it an hour or two and if she didn't come home in that time, he'd come back either later tonight or tomorrow. Evan had told him that this time of the summer, she was probably spending most days in her classroom, preparing it for the start of the school year. Tara taught sixth grade at St. Charles, a Catholic school in the next town. Evan assumed that she wasn't dating anybody else, at least not yet, so he was reasonably sure she'd be around by dinnertime most nights, if everything was still okay with her-if she wasn't hurt or sick, or dead.

So Nolan waited, comfortable on the hard stone step. The weather was really ideal, an afternoon floral scent from the gardenia hedge overlying the auto exhaust from the busy street, the fresh-cut-grass smell from the lawn below him, a faint whiff of chlorine from the complex's pool, a corner of which was visible off to his left. If he closed his eyes, Nolan could almost fool himself that he was back for a moment in high school. People were laughing and splashing down at the pool, and the disembodied sounds combined with the softness of the air to lull him after a while, carrying him away from what had become his real world of dust and duty, danger and death.

Like the trained animal he was, he came back to immediate full consciousness as a new vibration from the steps registered with his psyche. He looked down and saw a woman in a simple two-piece blue bathing suit stopped now on the third step, turned away from him, exchanging some banter with other friends who'd obviously just left the pool too. From the shade of her wet hair, he imagined it would be blond when it dried. A thick fall of it hung down her back to a little below the halter strap. She'd hooked a finger through her beach towel and thrown it carelessly over one shoulder. Nolan's eyes swept over the length of her body and he saw nothing about it he didn't like. Her skin was the color of honey.

He shifted on his step to get a better look just as she turned and glanced up at him. Catching him in the act, she shot him a brief complicitous smile that was neither embarrassed nor inviting, then quickly went back to the good-bye to her friends. One of them left her with some parting remark that Nolan didn't quite hear, but her spike of carefree laughter carried up to him. He hadn't heard a sound like that in a while.

Then she was coming up the stairs toward him.

Nolan stood up. He was wearing black shoes, pressed khakis, and a tucked-in camo shirt. He was holding Evan's letter in his hand. Suddenly she stopped halfway up, all trace of humor suddenly washed from her face. As tears welled in her eyes, she brought her hand up to her mouth. "Oh, my God," she said. "It's not Evan, is it? Tell me it's not Evan."

Realizing what she must be thinking-that he was the Army's messenger sent to inform her of Evan's death in Iraq -Nolan held out a reassuring hand and said, "Evan's fine. Completely fine. I'm sorry if I startled you. You must be Tara."

Still knocked out of her equilibrium, she nodded. "Yes. But…this is about Evan?"

Down below, one of her male friends called up to her. " Tara? Everything okay?"

It gave her an instant to collect herself. Turning, she waved. "I'm fine. It's okay." Coming back to Nolan, her voice had firmed up. "Who are you, then? What are you doing here? You had me thinking Evan had been killed."

"I'm sorry. My name's Ron Nolan. I'm a friend of Evan's over there. I should have realized what I'd look like waiting here for you to show up. I'm sorry."

"Okay, you're sorry." She pointed at the envelope he held. "What's that, then?"

"It's a letter that Evan asked me to hand-deliver to you. He was worried about you."

"Why would he worry about me? He's the one in the war zone."

"Well, he hasn't received any letters back from you."

"That's right. That's because I haven't written any. We broke up. Maybe he didn't tell you that. What does he want me to say?"

"I don't know." Nolan held the envelope out to her. "I'm just the messenger here. My job is to give you this last letter and then to tell Evan that you're all right."

"I'm fine."

"Yes, I can see that. You want to take this?"

She didn't move.

He waited, the envelope in his outstretched hand, looking at her, taken by her remarkable face. Her hair was pulled back; it revealed a clear, wide forehead. She'd just come from swimming, so there was no makeup to cover the landscape of pale freckles under her widely spaced glacier-blue eyes that spilled over onto well-defined cheekbones. Even without lipstick, her mouth looked slightly bruised.

Nolan forced himself to look away. It took a serious effort.

Tara looked down at the envelope. "Does he think I haven't gotten his other letters?" she asked. Her shoulders settled as something seemed to give in her. "I don't want to start again with him. Doesn't he see that? It's never going to work."

"Because you disagree about the war?"

"It's not just that."

"No?"

"No. Why do you ask that?"

"Because he seems to think it is. Just about the war, I mean. Although I told him, and I'll tell you the same thing, people who love each other don't break up over that."

"Over agreeing about whether or not killing people is the way to solve the world's problems? Oh yes, they do, I think."

Neither of them moved.

"And I didn't say that I loved him," she said.

Cocking his head, he said, "When you thought I was here to tell you he was dead, it seemed like you cared about him more than a little bit."

"You can care about someone without either loving them or wanting them to die. Don't you think that's possible?"

"Sure." The woman was beautiful, but Nolan thought that a little attitude check wouldn't hurt her. "Anything's possible," he said. "For example, it's possible that you might even change your mind someday about the people who are risking their lives to guarantee your freedom."

He'd clearly hit a nerve. Her whole face went dark. "That's not fair," she said. "I have nothing but respect for the military."

His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn't follow. "Sure you do," he said. "You just wouldn't want to marry one."

"Besides," she went on, "this war isn't about guaranteeing anyone's freedom. It's just about oil."

Nolan shook his head. As though fighting for oil or anything you needed was wrong. He looked down at his hand and held it out. "Are you going to take this letter or not?"

Her mouth set in a hard line, she stared at the thing as though it were alive and could bite her. And perhaps in some sense it could. At last, she shook her head. "I don't think so. I haven't even opened any of the others. I'm not going to start reading them now."

He nodded again as though she'd verified something for him.

"What does that look mean?"

"Nothing. There was no look."

"Yes, there was. And it meant something."

"Okay. You said you weren't going to start reading Evan's letters now. I guess the look meant, 'Spoken like someone who's afraid that if she gets some facts about what she's already decided on, she might change her mind.'"

Perhaps suddenly aware that she was standing arguing with a man while she was wearing less than her everyday underwear, she pulled the towel up over her shoulders and held both ends of it closed over her breasts. Her voice went soft and low in anger. "I'm not afraid of getting facts, Mister…what is it again?"

"Nolan. Ron Nolan."

"All right, Mr. Nolan…"

"Ron, okay?" Again, he grinned, taunting her.

"Okay, Ron." He'd gotten her heated up, which was his intention. "For your information, as a matter of fact I do have all the facts I need about Evan and about this stupid war in Iraq. And I don't need his letters to make me feel sorry for him. He made the decision to go over there. He decided to leave me and do that. Now I've moved on and he can't just think he's going to explain his way out of it and if I'd just understand how hard it was for him, then somehow we'd get back together. I'm not going to do that."

"No. I can see that." Nolan held out the letter again. "Last chance." When she didn't move to take it, Nolan slipped it into the pocket of his shirt and said, "I'll tell Evan you're in fine health. Excuse me. Nice to have met you." Moving past her, he started down the steps.

When he got to the bottom, she spoke. "Mr. Nolan. Ron."

Turning, he looked up at her. "I'm not against the military," she said. "I'm against Evan being in this war. There's a difference."

Nolan raised his hand in a salute. "Yes, ma'am," he said. "If you say so."

At seven-thirty, he rang her doorbell again.

She answered the door in tennis shoes, a pair of running shorts, and a black Nike tank top. Her hair back in a ponytail. She still hadn't put on any makeup and it looked as though she'd been crying.

"I'm not going to read that letter," she said first thing. "I already told you."

"Yes, you did. I'm not here for that."

"Well…what?"

"Well, pretty clearly you're not with Evan anymore. I thought maybe you'd like to go get a drink somewhere."

She crossed her arms. "You're asking me on a date?"

"I'm asking if you'd like to go get a drink or something. Not that big a commitment."

"I thought I made it clear how I feel about getting involved with military people."

"You did, which would break my heart if I were a military person. Which, fortunately, I'm not."

"But you said you were with Evan over there?"

"I am. But I'm a civilian. I work for Allstrong Security. Evan's based with our headquarters group. I'm back home on assignment here for a couple of weeks and tonight I'm looking at dinner all by myself, which isn't my favorite."

"So, as a last resort…"

"Not exactly that, but we had a couple of issues we could have fun talking about if we left Evan out of it." He looked around behind her into her apartment. "It doesn't look like you've got much of a party going here anyway."

"No." She sighed.

Sensing that she was weakening, he asked, "Have you eaten?"

"No."

"You can pick the place," he said. "Anywhere you want, sky's the limit."

Sighing again, she broke a weak smile and nodded. "That's a nice offer. Eating by myself isn't my favorite, either, and I've been doing a lot of that." She met his eyes, then looked away, wrestling with the decision.

"I don't want to have another fight about this war or about Evan."

"I don't want to fight either. I just want to put myself on the outside of some good food and drink."

"That does sound good." She gave it another second or two, then stepped back a bit, holding the door open for him. "You want to come in and sit down a minute, I'll go put on some clothes."

She picked an understated and very good Italian place on Laurel Street in San Carlos, maybe a mile from her apartment, a car ride short enough to preclude much in the way of conversation. Nolan, usually voluble in any situation, found himself somewhat tongue-tied from the minute she walked out of her hallway in low heels and the classic simple black spaghetti-strap dress. She wore a gold necklace that held a single black pearl, and matching earrings. She'd put her hair up, revealing a graceful neck, showcasing the face in relief.

Neither the bathing suit she'd been wearing when he'd met her nor the tank top, tennis shoes, and running shorts when she'd opened the door tonight had prepared him for the sophistication that she now exhibited. Before, of course, she'd been pretty enough to attract him-good-looking California-girl cheerleader-but now something in her style bespoke a worldliness and maturity that, frankly, intimidated him. Nolan's style, and his plan for that matter, had been to tease her about her political leanings and beliefs, wear her down, get her laughing and eventually tipsy, bed her, and report back to Evan that he was lucky she hadn't read his letters or written back-she wasn't worth the trouble.

Now, ten minutes of silence on the drive over pretty much shattered that plan. Try as he might, and as much as he might have wanted, he wasn't going to be able to take her that lightly. It wasn't just the bare fact of her substantial beauty, but a seriousness, a gravitas, that he couldn't remember ever having encountered before in the women he'd known.

Handing his keys to the valet in front of the restaurant, Nolan noticed that Tara remained seated, her hands clasped in her lap. A test? Would he be a chivalrous gentleman if he opened the door, or would that make him a chauvinist pig? He hadn't worried about a social nicety like that in ten years, and now suddenly he badly wanted to make the right decision, to look good in her eyes. But his only option was to be who he was, and his parents had raised him to have old-fashioned manners, so he came around and got her door for her. She rewarded him with a small smile in which, inordinately pleased, he read approval.

The tuxedoed maître d' knew who she was, at least by looks. He greeted her familiarly, kissed her hand, nodded at Nolan with respect and perhaps a soupçon of envy, and led them to a private banquette in the back. Lighting in the place was dim, with pinpoint lights onto the tables to facilitate reading the menu. Tara ordered an Italian-sounding white wine he'd never heard of and he asked for a Beefeater martini up.

The waiter left. Tara sipped her water. "I said I didn't want to fight, but we're allowed to talk if you want. If we don't, it might get to be a long night."

"I've been trying to avoid sensitive subjects."

"Okay, but you haven't said two words since my apartment."

"That's because everything I thought of seemed risky."

"Like what?"

Nolan hesitated, came out with it. "Like how lovely you look. See? I've offended you already."

"I'm not offended."

"I think you are. You frowned."

"I did?"

"Definitely."

"I didn't mean to frown. I'm not offended. It wasn't an offended frown. I'm even flattered. Thank you." She scratched at the napkin next to her plate. "I'm just not very comfortable with compliments, I suppose. Plus, I'm a little nervous. This might have been a mistake."

"What?"

"You and me. Going out for dinner. It just sounded so good to go out and…" Sighing, she killed a moment with another sip of water. "I don't want to give you the wrong impression."

"About what?"

"About if this is a date. Like a boy/girl date."

"Okay, I'll try not to get the wrong impression. What would be the right one?"

"That it's just dinner. Two people out at a restaurant together."

He smiled across at her. "As opposed to what? A romantic dinner?"

"I guess. I wasn't thinking this was going to be a romantic dinner. That's probably why I frowned."

"Back to that, huh? You frowned because I said you were lovely, which means I'm romantically interested."

"Something like that, I suppose."

The waiter arrived with their drinks, and Nolan waited until he'd moved out of earshot, then sipped at his martini and picked up where they'd left off. "Okay," he said, "I promise I'm trying not to be romantically interested. You're the girlfriend of a pal of mine, so that would be awkward, except you said that you're done with him."

"I think."

"Ah. A change in the story."

"No, not really. I just wasn't thinking that I was going to go out with anybody else so soon. I mean on a date."

"I've got an idea. How about we don't call this a date or anything else? Just let it be what it is. Do you have to decide that right away?"

"Maybe not. I just don't want to send you any mixed signals. I'm not really with Evan anymore, but I'm…"

"You still care about him."

She raised her shoulders. "I don't know. Not answering his letters is a decision. Not having feelings about him isn't something you just decide. I can't say I'm there yet. And now here we are, you and me. You asked me out and I said yes. I don't know why I did that."

"You were hungry?"

"We could have gone to McDonald's. I didn't have to get dressed up. This feels…different."

"Than McDonald's? I'd hope so." Nolan leaned in across the table, caught and held her gaze. "Look, Tara, it's not that complicated. I don't know you, and the only two things I know about you are, one, that we probably disagree about the military, which we're not allowed to talk about. And two, you're very pretty. That's just an observation, and risky because you might think I was coming on to you, which would put this more in the line of a date, I admit. So let's get that off the table right now." He straightened back up. "This is not a date. I'm way too old, and what are you, twenty-two?"

"Try twenty-six."

"Well, I'm thirty-eight, that's too much right there. I could be your father."

Around a small smile, she sipped wine. "Only if you were a very precocious eleven-year-old."

"I was," he said, and held out his stem glass. "Here's to precocious children."

She stopped, her glass halfway to his. "I don't know if I can drink to that. I teach eleven-year-olds. If they were any more precocious, we'd need bars on the windows."

Nolan kept his glass where it was. "All right," he said, "here's to peace, then. Is peace okay to drink to?"

She clinked his glass. "Peace is good," she said. "Peace would be very good."

Nolan pulled into a space in the parking lot by her apartment. He killed the engine and his lights and reached for his door handle.

"You don't have to get out," she said.

"No, I do. A gentleman walks a woman to her door on a dark night."

"That's all right. I'll be fine."

He sat back in his seat, then turned to look at her. "You're trying to avoid that awkward here-we-are-at-the-door moment. Understood. You don't have to ask me in for a nightcap. I won't try to kiss you good-night. Even if I am finding you marginally more attractive than before we'd had such a good time. That was a great meal."

"It was." But she spoke without much enthusiasm. Her hands clasped in her lap, she sat facing forward, stiff and unyielding.

"What is it?" he asked. "Are you all right?"

She exhaled. "Do you still have Evan's letter?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She didn't move. "I think I should read it. I should read the other ones."

"All right. It's in the glovebox, right in front of you. Help yourself." He opened the car door and stepped out. The night smells of gardenia, jasmine, magnolia-he'd forgotten how beautiful it could be here in California in the summertime. Walking around the car, he opened the passenger door.

Tara sat still another second, then opened the glove compartment, picked out the envelope, swung her legs, and got out. She said, "Really, Ron, I'm okay. That's my place, right up there, you can see it from here."

"Yes, you can, but it's against my religion to let you walk up there alone."

She sighed. "Okay."

"And no funny stuff," he said. "From you, I mean."

Amused in spite of herself, she looked up at him and shook her head. "I'll try to keep myself under control." Holding up the letter so he could see she had it, she turned and he fell in beside her-across the parking lot, up the outside stairs. Unlocking her door, she pushed it open and turned on the inside light. "Safe," she said. "Thank you."

"You're very welcome." He executed a small bow. "I had a great time," he said. "You sleep tight."

5

Saturday he took her up to San Francisco. This one was a nondate, he told her, because it was in the daytime and a real date by definition had to be at night. He picked her up at ten-thirty in the morning and with the top down on his Corvette, they took Highway 280 up to the city, the beautiful green back way, Crystal Springs reservoir on their left, and then, farther on, the great expanse of the glittering Bay down to their right.

She didn't know the city as well as he did. She'd told him that at dinner, and he'd used it as his excuse to ask her out again: She couldn't live as close as she did to one of the world's great cities and not know very much about it. It was morally wrong.

So they hit the Palace of the Legion of Honor, then swung back through Golden Gate Park, stopping for tea at the Japanese Tea Garden after an hour inside the De Young Museum. The fine August weather was holding up, and parking at Ghirardelli Square, they walked back up Polk Street and ate baguettes and pâté and drank red wine at one of the outdoor tables of a French bistro. Taking a walk afterward, idly sightseeing, they essayed the descent of Lombard, the "crookedest street in the world"-although it wasn't in fact even the crookedest street in the city, Nolan told her. That distinction belonged to Vermont Street down in Potrero Hill. Nevertheless, Lombard was crooked and steep enough, and he told her that she might want to put her hand on his arm for balance, and she did.

In North Beach, at Caffe Trieste, Nolan brought their cappuccinos over and put them down on the tiny table in front of her. "Okay," he said, "risky-question time again."

This time, more comfortable with him by now, she smiled and said, "Uh-oh."

"Think you can handle it?"

"You never know, but I'll try."

"Evan's letters."

"What about them?"

"Have you read them?"

She looked down at her coffee, lifted the cup and took a sip, then put it down carefully. "Why don't you just tell me I'm pretty again and we'll run with that instead?"

"Okay. You're pretty again. After that ugly time you had back there for a while."

"Yeah, that was terrible." But the gag wasn't working. Her mouth went tight and she closed her eyes, sighing, then opened them and looked him full in the face. "Not yet. I tried starting to read them the other night, but I'm still too emotional about him. I haven't changed my mind about what he's doing, so there's really nothing he can say…"

Nolan took a long moment before he sipped his coffee, another one before he spoke. "You don't see anything noble or glorious or even good in the warrior, do you?"

She briefly met his eyes. "The warrior," she said in a derisive tone.

"The warrior, that's right."

She shook her head. "Evan's not a warrior, Ron. Evan's a simple soldier, a grunt who's taking orders from men he doesn't respect, fighting in a country that doesn't want us there, risking his life for a cause he doesn't believe in. I have a hard time with words like noble and glorious and good coming into that equation when I keep seeing waste and stupidity and ignorance."

"Okay," Nolan said. "We could maybe get in a good fight about this particular war. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the philosophical concept of the warrior."

Her face was still set in stone. "I never think about the warrior, Ron. War is what's wrong with the world, and always has been."

Again, Nolan let a silence accumulate. "With all respect, Tara," he said quietly, "you owe it to yourself to think about this."

"To myself?"

"If you're dumping the guy you're in love with over it, then yes. To yourself."

"I've told you, I don't know if I'm in love with him anymore."

"Because he went to fight?"

She slowly turned her coffee cup around. "I told him we could go to Canada, or anywhere else."

"And what happens when Canada or wherever feels threatened and needs soldiers?"

"But that's the point, Ron. There was no threat. Iraq was no threat. It was preemptive, like Germany invading Poland. America doesn't do that, that's the point. There are no WMDs, you wait and see. The whole thing's a sham. It's about oil profits and that's all. Halliburton and those people. Can't you see that?"

"Defense contractors, you mean?"

"Yes. Defense contractors. Big business. Cheney and his buddies."

"Well, of course I see what you're saying, but I'm in a little bit of a bind here, because a defense contractor is who I work for. But from my perspective, we're the guys who are protecting the Army and the civilian admin guys over there. We're the ones feeding our troops, moving water and supplies, doing good work, saving lives, trying to rebuild the country."

"That we destroyed in the first place."

Nolan took a breath. "Look, Tara, war may be hell but that doesn't mean everybody involved in it is evil. I've seen evil, and believe me, it's a whole different animal than what you're thinking of. So let's not talk about this war. I grant you it's got some issues. Let's talk about the warrior."

"The warrior, the warrior. I don't want the warrior in my life, that's all. I don't want the warrior in the world."

"Ah, but there's the crux of it. Of course it would be wonderful if there didn't need to be warriors. Just like it would be great if there were no evil in the world. But here's the thing-there is evil. And without warriors, evil would triumph."

"How 'bout this, Ron: Without warriors, evil couldn't attack."

"So it's chicken and egg, is that it? Which came first? No"-he put his hand on hers, took it away as though it burned him-"listen. My point is this: There is always going to be evil and, yes, it will attract evil warriors. You buy that so far?"

She managed a small nod.

"Okay," he went on. "So evil and its minions are a given, right? Right. Come on, you admit that. You've just admitted it. And, P.S., it's true."

She hesitated, then said, "Okay. Yes. So?"

"So once evil's on the march, what's going to stop it except a greater force for good?"

She sat back and folded her arms. "The greater force doesn't always have to be physical. It can be spiritual. Look at Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. Fighting should be a last resort. I think a lot of so-called warriors are really warmongers picking fights to justify their own existence."

"Sometimes they are, yeah. And Gandhi and King, great men, both of them, no question. And both assassinated, I might point out. And neither used their nonviolence in an actual war. Okay, they fought evil, but it wasn't on the march. It wasn't to the warrior stage yet. But even so, for every King or Gandhi, you've got a Neville Chamberlain or somebody who doesn't want to fight. It's not till you get yourself a warrior-like, say, Churchill-that you really can stop active evil. You think Hitler would have stopped by himself? Ever? Or Saddam Hussein, for that matter?"

"We did stop him, Hussein," she said. "He wasn't a threat."

Nolan let his shoulders relax. His face took on a peaceful neutrality. His voice went soft. " Tara, please, you've got it backward. If he wasn't a threat, it was because we did already stop him once. Our warriors stopped him in Kuwait. That's the only thing he understood."

Tara was twirling her cup around in its saucer, biting on her lower lip. Eventually she raised her eyes. "I don't like to think about this, Ron. About evil's place in the world."

He kept his voice low, met her eyes, again put his hand over hers and this time left it there. "I don't blame you, Tara. Nobody likes to think about it. And some places, like here in the U.S., and on a gorgeous afternoon in this great city, it can seem so far away as to be nonexistent. Thank God. I mean, thank God there are islands where the beast is kept mostly at bay. It's in its cage. But the thing to remember is that somebody, sometime, had to put the beast in there, and has to keep it there. And that's why we need-we all need, the world needs-warriors. How did you feel about Evan being a cop?"

Her frown deepened, her head moving from side to side. "I don't think I was exactly thrilled, but that was different."

"How?"

She worried her lip for another moment. "Soldiers, their job is to kill. Cops, they mostly protect."

"And sometimes to protect, don't they have to kill?"

"But it's not the main job."

"Could that be because individual bad guys don't need an army to defeat them?" He took his hand away from hers and sat up straighter, lifted his cup to his mouth, put it back down. Looking at her, he saw that her eyes had gone glassy and tears hung in their corners. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to ruin your day and make you cry. We can stop talking about this."

One tear fell, leaving its streak on her face. "I don't know what I'm going to do. It's so hard."

"It is," he said. "I know."

"I'm trying to do the right thing."

"I can see that."

"I should at least read his letters."

"That might be nice."

"But I'm still…" She stopped, looked at him, shook her head again. "I don't have any answers. I don't know what I should do."

"You don't have to decide anything today. How's that?"

She gave him a grateful smile. "Better."

"Okay, then," he said. "I think that's about enough philosophy for one day. Why don't we blow this pop stand?"

One of the landmarks of old San Francisco was Trader Vic's, the restaurant where the mai tai was purportedly invented and a favorite hangout for the famous columnist Herb Caen and his pals. The original Vic's had gone out of business decades ago, but a couple of years back, they'd opened a new one near City Hall. It had a great buzz and was the same kind of place-a Pacific-island-themed destination spot serving enormous "pu-pu" platters of vaguely Asian appetizers that could be washed down with mai tais or any other number of generous rum drinks, many of them served for two out of hollowed coconut shells.

Nolan and Tara had ordered one of these when they sat down and then had another with their dinner. Their relaxed sightseeing and later the intense conversations had drawn them closer somehow and blurred the distinction between date and nondate, and by the time the waiter cleared the dinner trays and left them the check, Nolan was beginning to let himself consider the possibility that this incredible woman might like something in him after all. Clearly, Tara had an ambiguous commitment, at best, to Evan Scholler, and she seemed to be enjoying his company-laughing, teasing, drinking. Not quite outright flirting, certainly not coming on to him overtly, but giving him a lot of her time and attention, her foot nowhere near the brakes. His personal code of honor regarding a fellow warrior wouldn't permit him to pursue her if she claimed any sort of allegiance to Evan, but she'd rather definitively avoided that, and if she responded to one of his overtures later, then that would be a clear answer in itself.

Nolan had known that they had valet parking at Trader Vic's, but as a general rule he wasn't too comfortable letting valet attendants get behind the wheel of his Corvette. So, keeping his eyes open, a few blocks before they'd reached the restaurant, he had spied a miraculous section of free curb and he'd pulled into it without much thought. It had still been warm, with a certain softness to the dusk light, and walking a few extra blocks with Tara had seemed both natural and appealing.

Now, outside, it had grown dark. In typical San Francisco summer fashion, the temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the past two hours and a chill, biting wind off the Pacific was scouring the dust off the streets and making the very air gritty. They were on Golden Gate Avenue, an east-west street that funneled the blow and intensified the unpleasantness.

Tara said, "How'd it get this nasty this fast?"

"The city got the patent on this weather back in the Forty-Niner days. It was supposed to keep out the riffraff. I don't think it's worked too well, but they've kept it up. Why don't you go back inside and I'll get the car and come back for you?"

"We don't have to do that. It's not that far. I can take it."

"You're not too cold?" Tara was wearing sandals and shorts and a T-shirt with the midriff showing- California summer gear. Now ridiculously inappropriate.

But she just laughed. "It's only a few blocks. It's invigorating, don't you think?"

Nolan, in civilian shoes, khaki-colored Dockers, and a Tommy Bahama silk shirt, nodded and said, "Invigorating. Good word. You sure?"

"Let's go."

At the first corner they hit, Polk Street, they stopped at the curb for the light. He noticed that her teeth were beginning to chatter. "It's closer going back to Trader Vic's than it is to the car. You're sure you don't want to do that?"

"You think I'm that much of a wimp?"

"I never said that. But you do seem cold."

"I'll be fine. Promise."

"Okay, then." He put his arm around her. "This is for warmth only," he told her. "Don't get any ideas."

Perhaps a little tipsy, she folded her arms across her chest and leaned slightly into him. "Warmth is good," she said, then added, "Come on, light, come on."

But just then, before the light changed, a break in the traffic opened up, and taking her hand, he squeezed it. "¡Vámonos!" And they darted out into the street. In the next block, and the one after that, the streetlights weren't working. Even though they were only a few blocks from City Hall, Nolan realized that they were entering the Tenderloin District, one of the city's worst neighborhoods, where services tended to need upkeep. They walked quickly, still holding hands, their footfalls echoing, and, at the next crosswalk-Larkin-had to stop again for traffic and the light. Behind them, a prostitute in a black minidress and fishnet top stepped out from the lee of a building. "Are you two looking to party?" From the voice, Nolan realized that the woman was a man. "I've got a place right here behind us."

"Thanks, but we're good." Nolan stepped between Tara and the prostitute. "Just going to our car."

"Isn't this the street, up to the left?" Tara whispered to him.

"One more."

They jumped the light again and moved into the next darkened block. Suddenly the glittering city they'd been enjoying all day had disappeared. The breeze carried on it the acrid smells of garbage and urine. In the passing cars' headlights, Nolan could see that nearly every doorway they passed held a person lying down, bundled up in cloth or newspaper. At a break in the traffic, they crossed over in midblock, all but running now with cold and adrenaline. They turned up Leavenworth toward Eddy, into the heart of the Tenderloin. But-the good news-they were now only a bit more than a half block from where they'd parked.

As it turned out, though, that distance wasn't going to be short enough.

The three young african-american men appeared out of nowhere and blocked their way. Tara whispered, "Oh God," and moved in a step behind Nolan. All of the men wore heavy, hooded jackets and as they fanned to surround the couple, the one in front of them flashed the blade of a knife. "Where y'all hurryin' up to?" he asked.

Nolan, following the flow as the men moved into position, one to the side into the street, and the other behind them, let go of Tara 's hand and put an arm protectively around her waist. "Our car's just up the street there," he said, pointing.

"The 'Vette, I'm guessing?"

"That's right."

"Nice ride?"

"Yes, it is. I'm hoping that it's still in good shape."

The leader spoke to his troops. "He hopin' it still in good shape. You hear that? Man worried about his wheels." Coming back to Nolan, he moved the knife to his other hand. "Thing is, we been watchin' it, make sure nobody mess wid it, you know what I'm saying?"

"I appreciate that," Nolan said. He turned now, placed the position of his other two assailants clearly in his mind, then moved sideways a bit with Tara so that he could see any movement from the man behind him in case he was getting ready to strike. Looking now directly at the three men, one at a time, he said, "But my girlfriend's cold and she really needs to get inside the car right away." He reached behind him, as though reaching for his wallet. "How much can I pay you gentlemen for watching over my car for me?"

"Ron…" Tara began.

"Just stay cool," he whispered, tightening his grip on her waist, holding her to him. Somehow he'd taken the keys from his pocket, and now he found one of her hands and pressed them into it. "When it starts," he whispered directly into her ear, "get to the car and get it running."

"When what starts? Ron, you can't…"

Nolan started to reply when, with no warning beyond a guttural obscenity, the leader suddenly lunged forward, leading with the knife. Nolan pushed Tara back out of the way, then ducked away from the attack, deflecting the knife, and kicked out behind him, hitting the trailing man in the knee. The man screamed and went down. Nolan whirled, kicked again, and caught the leader in the hip, knocking him into the third guy coming in from the street. It was only a temporary holding action, but it gave the couple an instant's reprieve and, for Tara, a clear run to the car. "Go!" he yelled to her.

She ran.

Nolan saw the shadow looming up in his periphery, and he ducked away and slashed backward as he turned. Seeing the glint of the knife, he came down with a chop on the wrist above it, and it clattered away on the sidewalk. He no longer knew whether he was fighting the leader or the second guy, but it didn't matter. Close enough to smell him now, he lifted a knee into the man's groin and when he doubled over, followed it with a rabbit punch to the man's neck. Knowing that he'd killed him, as much by the way he fell as anything, he saw that there was still another knife in the equation. The other man swung a wide broadside at him and Nolan stepped back, let it pass harmlessly in front of him, then stepped inside and delivered a flat-hand uppercut to the base of man's nose, driving the cartilage back into the brain. The body straightened for an instant before crumpling back to the street.

Looking back at the first man whose knee he'd shattered, Nolan realized that while he was no longer a threat, he was a witness. And witnesses, Nolan firmly believed, were bad luck. A brief scan of his surroundings confirmed that there were no others-none of the homeless were huddling in doorways on this block. The man was still down, moving on the ground, pushing himself in a crablike fashion back and away from the fight. It took Nolan only a few steps, a couple of seconds, to get back next to him.

"Dude," he said. He was breathing hard, but his voice was almost apologetic, devoid of any emotion. "This was a bad idea. You got to stop this shit. Your leg okay? Can you get up? You ought to get that looked at. Here, let me help you."

The young man hesitated for a minute, but then took Nolan's outstretched hand and allowed himself to begin to be lifted. But as soon as he had the leverage he needed, Nolan reached his other hand around the man's neck, found his chin, and gave it a vicious snap back and sideways. Letting this last body fall back to the sidewalk, Nolan looked down at the carnage he'd wreaked. Satisfied, he broke back up the street at a jog, jumped over the fallen leader, and in a couple of dozen steps was where Tara had started the car and already maneuvered it out from the curb, ready to make a getaway. He knocked on the car's trunk as he was going around the back of it and then opened the passenger door and jumped in, breathless. "Are you okay?" he asked her. "Can you drive?"

She was holding the wheel, shivering, and managed a nod.

"Hit it, then. Now!"

Tara drove in silence for about six blocks before she pulled over and stopped the car. "I don't think I can drive anymore," she said.

"I'll take it."

She looked over at him for the first time since he'd gotten in with her. "Are you hurt?"

"No."

"What happened to them?"

"I don't know. They got tangled up in each other and that must have slowed them down enough to give me a minute to come running."

After a minute, she said, "We could have been killed, couldn't we?"

"I don't know about that. I think maybe they were trying to feel us out, that's all. They didn't have guns. They probably would have just taken our money and other stuff if we would have let them."

She sat still and allowed the silence to gather there in the confined space. Then, letting out a staggered breath, she opened the car door and got out. Nolan took the cue and did the same on his side, waiting for her to get in the passenger seat before he closed the door behind her. Behind the wheel, he belted up and got back into traffic.

"God," she said after a while. "You're sure you're all right? I can't believe that just happened. It was so fast. Just suddenly they were there."

"Yeah. That's how it happens." He glanced across at her. "I shouldn't have parked there. I should have known better. I wasn't thinking. I'm so sorry."

"You don't need to be sorry. It wasn't your fault. In fact, if you hadn't been there…"

But he shook his head. "Then you wouldn't have been there. You would have parked at the valet station like any other thinking human being."

"Well, still…" She hugged her arms to herself. "God, I just can't stop shaking."

"It's okay," he said. "It's just adrenaline." He took his right hand off the wheel and held it out. "If it'll help," he said, "here's a hand you can hold."

It took her a moment to decide. She took in a breath and let it out, then reached over and put her hand in his, bringing both hands over the gear-shift and into her lap, then covering them with her other hand. "Thank you," she said. "That helps."

There was no argument about whether he should walk with her to her door. She opened it, flicked on the inside light, and turned back toward him, her face reflecting her turmoil. Breaking a weak, somehow apologetic smile, she started to raise her hand then let it fall. "I was going to say, 'Thank you, I had a good time,' but"-she met his eyes-"I'm a little confused right now. Is that all right?"

"That's fine," Nolan said.

"I'm going to read Evan's letters."

"As well you should."

"I don't want you to think I'm being ungrateful."

"Why would I think that?"

"Well, for saving my life and everything. For being a warrior."

That brought the trace of a smile. "I wondered if that had occurred to you. But you don't owe me anything, Tara, and certainly nothing for that." He gently chucked her chin with his index finger. "Don't you worry about me. I'm fine. You've just had a trauma you're going to need to process. It's okay. You're home now. Have a good night." And with that, he came forward, quickly kissed her cheek, and backed away. "Close the door," he said. "That's an order."

Unable to sleep, she finally got to the letters.

They were from Evan's heart and soul. The way she remembered him came through loud and clear in every one-mostly chatty and irreverent, but then always there with the real stuff at the end. He missed her. He loved her and wanted them to try again when he got home.

When.

But it wasn't when, she knew. It was if. There was no certainty that he'd come back alive or in one piece. She couldn't shake the idea that even as she was reading his words, he might already be dead. She wasn't about to commit to him again and then have him die over there. There would be no commitment, she knew, until they were back together in person, until these philosophical issues had been resolved one way or the other. To give him hope before that would just be counterproductive and stupid.

Tara was reading in her bed with blankets over her, wearing pajamas and her warmest bathrobe against her continued shivering, even though it was a balmy night in Redwood City. Finally, she put down the latest letter-it was the fifth or sixth one she'd read-and closed her eyes, trying to picture the Evan she had known in her mind, trying to dredge up a feeling from the time when she'd thought they were the perfect couple, that they'd marry and have a family and a wonderful life together. It wasn't coming easy.

Part of her, perhaps most of her, still believed that she loved him, that he would come home from this war and they'd start over and work out all the issues. But he'd been gone now for several months and she'd spent the time putting him behind her. When he came back-if he came back-they'd see where they were. She thought that if she and Evan were in fact the perfect couple, if they were meant to be together, then nothing could keep them apart. But in the meanwhile she had her life and her principles. She wasn't going to remain in a relationship where those principles were compromised from the beginning.

But tonight's object lesson with Ron Nolan had shaken some of those core beliefs. They had been set upon by bad people who wished them harm, and without Nolan to defend her, she might very well…

Suddenly the memory of the assault came over her again-the men surrounding them with knives glinting in their fists. The utter lack of warning when the unexpected first thrust came at them. If Ron hadn't been there…or, no, more than that…if he hadn't been who he was, it could have ended so badly. It could have been not just a robbery, but the end of her life, of everything.

A fresh wave of adrenaline straightened her up in the bed.

Throwing off her covers, she went to the window in the bedroom and pulled aside the drapes a couple of inches, just enough so that she could see out. The blue-lit water in the pool down below was still. No shadows moved on the lawn, in the surrounding hedges. All was peace and suburban serenity. Letting the drapes fall, she crossed her bedroom and, turning on lights as she walked, she went out into the living room. She opened the closet in that room, the other one by the front door, then she turned and went into the kitchen. The window over the sink looked down on the parking lot and she turned out the kitchen lights so that she could more clearly see outside.

In the puddle of one of the streetlights, Ron Nolan's Corvette faced away from her apartment, toward the entrance to the driveway that led into the parking lot. The top was down, and it was close enough that she could easily see Ron himself still in the front seat, his elbow resting on the windowsill. She looked at the clock-he'd left her at the door nearly forty-five minutes before.

"Ron?"

He'd heard the footsteps coming up and had forced himself to remain still, facing forward, until she'd come abreast of him. Now he looked over at her, in her T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. "Hey." Low-key.

"What are you doing?"

"Just sitting here. Enjoying the night." She seemed to need more explanation and he gave it to her. "I was a little wound up earlier. I thought I'd decompress a little before braving the roads again. I thought you'd be asleep by now."

"No," she said. "I was wound up too." Pausing, she let out a small breath. "I read Evan's letters. I think he's still confused. I know I am."

"About what?"

"Us. Me and him. What I'm going to do."

"What do you want to do about Evan?"

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be confused, would I? I haven't been fair to him either. I should write and tell him what I've been feeling."

"And what is that?"

"That maybe we still have a chance if he's willing to try to get through all this stuff. But that has to be in the future, when he gets back, if he does get back. I can't commit again until then, till we see what we've got. Does that sound fair to you?"

"I'm not an unbiased source," he said. "It sounds to me like you just said you weren't committed to him."

"We broke up five months ago, Ron." She took in a breath. "What were you really doing out here?" she asked.

"I was enjoying the night, the smells, the absence of gunfire." He looked up at her. "I was also hoping you might not be able to sleep and you'd see me down here, and that you'd come down and that I'd see you again. Maybe walk you back to your door."

After a second, she said, "You could do that."

6

In San Francisco, Deputy Chief of Inspectors Abe Glitsky entered the homicide detail at nine-thirty on the following Monday morning. Darrel Bracco, one of Glitsky's early protégés, looked up from the report he was writing and almost spilled his coffee standing up to attention, saluting, yelling, "Ten-hut!"

Glitsky felt the scar through his lips straining against the rare urge to smile. In the end, as usual, the smile never appeared. Some inspectors in the room looked up, of course, though nobody else went military on him. But Bracco was still on his feet, expectantly. He evidently had some knowledge of why the head of homicide, Lieutenant Marcel Lanier, had summoned the deputy chief. "Marcel told me to keep an eye out for you, sir. I was just warning him that you're here."

Glitsky stopped. "On the off chance that he's misbehaving in some way?"

"You never know," Bracco said. He fell in beside Glitsky, then nodded at another inspector, a woman named Debra Schiff, who looked up and was getting to her feet while Bracco went on. "Schiff was in there with him with the door closed for an hour already this morning. To look at her, you'd never know she was a screamer."

Schiff, gathering some stuff from her desk, nodded at Abe and replied in a conversational tone, "Bite me, Darrel."

Glitsky kept walking, Bracco and Schiff behind him. At Lanier's open door, he knocked. The lieutenant was on the phone, feet up on his desk, and waved everybody in. His new office upstairs was at least twice as large as the cubicle he (and Glitsky before him) had inhabited one floor below. There was room for as many as half a dozen people in front of his desk, with four chairs folded up against the back wall with its "Active Homicides" blackboard. Glitsky unfolded one of the chairs and let the other two inspectors grab theirs.

"I understand," Lanier was saying into the phone. "Yes, sir. That's why I've asked Abe to come down and get briefed. No"-he rolled his eyes with the tedium of it all-"I realize we don't want to…" He moved the telephone away from his ear and Glitsky could hear a voice he recognized as Frank Batiste's, the chief of police. So whatever this was about, it had some profile already. "Yes, sir," Lanier repeated in the next pause, "that's the idea. I will. Yes, sir." Finally, he hung up, got his feet back down on the ground, and brought his upper body in close to the desk, elbows on it. "That was the chief."

"I got that impression," Glitsky said. "How's Frank doing this fine morning?"

"Frank's concerned about our citizenry, lest they panic."

"And why would they do that?"

"Well, that's what I asked you down to talk about, since the media's going to be all over this if it gets out, and I know how much you cherish all things that give you face time in front of cameras." Everyone appreciated the irony of Lanier's statement. Within the department, Glitsky was notorious for two things: He didn't tolerate or use profanity, and he hated interactions with any form of media. Unfortunately, this latter made up about eighty-five percent of his job.

Now, a tight look of resigned patience firmly in place, Abe sat back and crossed one leg over the other one, ankle on knee. "Okay. What do we got?"

Lanier glanced at his two inspectors, came back to Glitsky. "We've got the possibility of a serial killer."

"Ah," Glitsky said. "And we haven't had one of those for a while."

"Hence the panic," Lanier said, "which Frank would so like to avoid. Anyway, I thought I'd let Darrel and Debra get you up to speed and you can decide where we are exactly and how we handle things if it gets hot." He nodded at his female inspector, whose pretty face she tried to make invisible, with limited success, by wearing a tough expression most of the time. "Debra, you want to start?"

"Sure." Bent over slightly in her chair, she had her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. Raising her chin, she shifted a little to face Glitsky. "It's not much of a story by itself, but last Wednesday, I got a late call down in the Mish, early a.m. There's a body in an alley down there around the corner from the Makeout Room. White male, decently dressed, his wallet's still in his back pocket. Turns out he's a thirty-six-year-old ex-Navy SEAL named Arnold Zwick. No criminal record, unmarried and unconnected, currently unemployed. But he'd evidently come back from Iraq recently where he'd done some work for Allstrong Security, which is based here in town."

"What kind of work?" Glitsky asked.

"Whatever they do over there with former military guys. I went back to Allstrong and they told me that their main contract right now is protecting Baghdad Airport. But they didn't know where Zwick had gone to. The manager of the office told me they thought that he might have been killed over there. One day he just disappeared. Except that we now know he came back here. And some witnesses I talked to-neighbors he'd made friends with-seemed to have had the impression that he had a lot of money. But it's not in a bank account that I've been able to find, and there wasn't any cash in his apartment, so robbery might still be a motive, either that or he had the stuff hidden pretty well."

Glitsky asked, "Do you think it's possible he stole money from Allstrong over there?"

Debra nodded, apparently pleased at the question. "That was my assumption, too, sir. Especially given the way he died."

"And how was that?"

"Somebody snapped his neck."

"Close work," Glitsky said. "Not that easy."

"It's even harder when you factor in Zwick's training and that there was no sign of struggle or a weapon from his attacker. And Zwick was heavily armed. He had a knife in a sheath on his leg and a forty-five carried loose in his coat pocket. Both still on him when I got to him."

"So his killer," Glitsky said, "was another commando. You were thinking probably with Allstrong, somehow, getting back their money."

Debra nodded. "That is kind of where I was going until Marcel called me yesterday and told me about Darrel's latest."

Glitsky shifted his interest over to Bracco. "Talk to me," he said.

" Three street thugs, all with sheets. All of 'em young, strong, and armed, out for a good time on Saturday night in the Tenderloin. All of 'em killed by hand. Maybe they just decided to mug the wrong guy, the same guy who killed Zwick, but that's a stretch, don't you think?"

"The stretch is why he would have stayed around," Glitsky said, "if he's one of the Allstrong people."

"There aren't any Allstrong people, though," Debra said. "The whole staff is over in Iraq. They've got a woman manager over here in a tiny office by Candlestick and a couple of clerks. None of 'em had ever met Zwick personally. And I believe them."

"On the other hand," Lanier interjected, "maybe we got a bona fide wacko who's getting off on killing people with his hands. These Tenderloin meatballs, we got two broken necks and a septum jabbed up into the brain. But there's no connection we can come up with between Zwick and these dirtbags. None of the victims had anything stolen off them."

Glitsky scratched at his cheek. "How many broken-neck murders have you seen in the past twenty years, Marcel?"

The lieutenant nodded. "I know what you're saying, Abe. And every one of the very few was in the course of some kind of a fight. These guys, there was hardly a sign of a struggle. The problem is that we got reporters already onto the story-I got a call at home this morning, and so did Frank-and they're salivating over this serial killer possibility."

Glitsky chewed the inside of his cheek for a minute. "And Allstrong hires Navy SEALs and guys like that for their security work over in Iraq?"

"That's what I gather," Debra said. "They've got nice brochures, but really, as I said, no people."

"But let's not lose sight of the main question," Lanier said. "We don't want to spin this toward a serial killer loose in the city. Frank would have my balls. Excuse me, Debra."

But Glitsky was standing up. "I'm doing my very favorite Monday-morning press briefing in fifteen, Marcel. I'll put that fire out at least until we get another broken neck."

"What are you going to tell 'em?" Lanier asked.

"I'll say I can't comment on ongoing investigations, except to say that it would be irresponsible to print or run rumors of a serial killer when there is no evidence to support it. And none of these victims are high profile. We got three dead brothers in the hood and one dead unemployed white guy in the Mish. This stuff is unfortunate but it happens. And the story goes away."

"Even if this guy's the same guy," Bracco said, "who did all of them?"

"If it was," Glitsky said, "I've got to believe he's long gone by now and never coming back."

7

Major Charles Tucker, the Senior Auditor for Aviation Issues, didn't like to leave the Green Zone any more than anyone else did. But in the past ten days, since Ron Nolan had shown up downstairs at the Republican Palace with his $2 million requisition, he had signed off on another $3.3 million in cash to Allstrong Security-all of it approved by Airbase Security Services Coordinator Colonel Kevin Ramsdale.

Jack Allstrong himself had shown up at his desk four times, patiently explaining to Tucker that obviously, if he continued to question the need for money, he was unaware of the sheer vastness of the task that Allstrong Security had contracted to undertake. The airport itself, BIAP, was enormous-thirty-two thousand acres. Securing even half of all that land alone in a hostile country was a monumental job. Besides that, Allstrong needed immediate money to buy the cars and trucks that would deliver the new dinar cash all over the country on his latest contract. He also needed more money for the bomb-sniffing dogs, for his enormous payroll, for food for his constantly growing influx of employees.

In spite of the danger inherent in every trip outside of the Green Zone, Tucker decided he had to see for himself what was going on out at BIAP. Leaving the Republican Palace in the early afternoon, and in uniform, he was chaffeured through the city and out to the airport by a three-Mercedes convoy of KBR security people who carried only sidearms-the irony wasn't lost on him. Nevertheless, by the time they arrived at the first airport checkpoint, it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon.

There was, as always, a long line of cars ahead of his convoy, all of them waiting to be searched and to have their papers inspected. At this rate, Tucker's convoy wasn't going to get inside for at least another hour. So to save himself the time, he decided to get out of his vehicle and enter the compound on foot. With any luck, he could complete his informal inspection and start back to Baghdad before his convoy even made it as far as the gate anyway. They could U-turn away and be gone with that much less of a hassle.

But no sooner had he gotten out of his car than he became aware of the sound of gunfire. Not distant gunfire, which was so common in Baghdad and often relatively harmless, but nearby gunfire that seemed to be coming from the neighborhood just to his left, adjacent to the eastern border of BIAP. In contrast to the airport's western edge, which bordered the Euphrates River and opened into a plain of flat and formless ditch-crossed farmland that gradually degraded into desert, this eastern no-man's-land was a densely populated area of the ubiquitous low-lying, dung-brown structures that seemed to make up so many of Baghdad's suburbs, and that Tucker knew to be home to hundreds of Saddam Hussein's former officers. Gunfire in this area wouldn't be good news. But still, if it was confined to the neighborhood, he knew that it needn't necessarily concern him here.

Squatting, moving along the safe side of the line of vehicles, Tucker had almost made it to the gate when he realized that the gunfire was in fact close by. Stopping, he saw a handful of men scurrying along just outside the compound, by the barricades that had sprung up along the perimeter's fence. All of the black-clad men had camo'd their faces-Tucker knew that they weren't regular Army. They all carried rifles and belts of ammunition, and they were firing out into the suburbs.

Still keeping low, he sprinted to the gate, where four men-also heavily armed, in matching dark fatigues-were manning the entrance, seemingly unconcerned with the firing going on behind them. Tucker walked up to the nearest of them. "Hey!" Holding up his hand. "Major Charles Tucker. What the hell's going on over there?"

The man, who was not American, looked over his shoulder, then back at Tucker. He shrugged and spoke in a stiltedly correct British accent. "We were taking some fire from over there. Jack Allstrong ordered our men to put them down."

"You're attacking them?"

"It appears so, yes."

"You can't do that. That's against policy."

Again, the man shrugged. "Mr. Allstrong called them out."

"Well, let's get Mr. Allstrong here so he can call them off. You can't conduct an offensive with nonmilitary personnel."

Another man, with the same accent as the first, broke away from his inspecting comrades and got in front of Tucker. "Is there a problem, sir?"

"You bet there's a problem." He pointed to the shooters. "I'm assuming those men are working with Allstrong. Who's in charge here?"

"I am."

"What's your name?"

"Khadka Gurung."

"Where are you from?"

" Nepal."

"Well, Mr. Gurung, I'm a major in the U.S. Army. Private military forces are not allowed to attack insurgent groups."

"But we were fired upon first. From over there." He pointed vaguely to the general neighborhood.

"You were fired upon?"

"Yes, sir."

Tucker pointed. "Was anyone in this line of cars hit?"

"I don't believe so. No, sir."

"But the cars were just sitting here, like they are now?"

"That's correct."

"And none of them were hit?"

"I don't believe so."

"And nobody's firing from over there now?"

"No. We must have driven them off."

"Either that, Mr. Gurung, or there wasn't much of a concerted attack, if they couldn't manage to hit stationary vehicles at less than a hundred yards. Maybe the attack was just celebratory gunfire, which we hear all the time in Baghdad. How about that?"

"That's not impossible."

At that moment, several of the group of commandos broke into a run across an open area toward the Iraqi buildings. "They're attacking, for Christ's sake! That's blatantly illegal. Where's Jack Allstrong now? He's got to call this off. I need to talk to him right away. Do you think you could manage to arrange that?"

Gurung, nonplussed by Tucker's apparent anger, said, "Of course. Please to wait here and I'll try to reach him." In no great hurry, he walked over to a small stucco building that looked as though it had recently been constructed just inside the gate. He picked up a telephone.

Tucker, meanwhile, whirled back to face the first man he'd talked to. "Who are you?" he snapped.

"I am Ramesh Bishta."

"Well, Mr. Bishta, while we're waiting for Mr. Allstrong, can you tell me what's holding things up so badly here? Why can't you get this line moving?"

"The drivers," he explained. "So many do not speak English. It is difficult."

"Of course they don't speak English. They're mostly Iraqis. They're delivering Iraqi goods, doing Iraqi business. Don't you have people here at the gate who speak Arabic?"

"No, sir. I'm sorry, but no."

"How about translators?"

"Again. No. Maybe someday."

Tucker brought his hands to his head and squeezed his temples. He'd personally overseen the transfer of nearly six million dollars to Allstrong Security in the past two weeks and apparently Jack Allstrong couldn't find one local worker to speak Arabic to the Iraqis who needed to get into his airport? To say nothing of the fact that against all regulations he was paying his private commandos to lead offensive military strikes against the civilian population. Tucker had come to believe that Allstrong was playing fast and loose with the chaos that was Iraq, but now he was starting to believe that he didn't understand the half of it.

Gurung returned and informed Tucker than Mr. Allstrong was on the way. The next car at the gate finally got approval and moved on into the compound. The raiding party seemed to have stopped for the moment at the back line of the neighborhood buildings. Tucker took the opportunity to ask Gurung about the dogs.

"I'm sorry?" The unfailingly polite guard shrugged.

"The bomb-sniffing dogs. I would assume they would be here at the gate, checking the cars. The trunks."

"No. I haven't seen these dogs yet. Perhaps soon." Still smiling, the soul of cooperation, Gurung asked to be excused for a moment. He went over to Bishta, and after a short conversation, the two men went and had a few words with their other two colleagues. Almost immediately, they stepped away from the next car in the line and waved it through the gate. And then the next. And the next. The line was starting to move.

Tucker watched for a minute, then stepped in front of the next car up, holding up his hand to stop it. The driver laid on his horn, but Tucker kept his hand up where it was, holding him back. "Mr. Gurung!" he yelled out. "What's happening now? You've kept these people sitting here for hours and now you're just letting them in?"

This finally brought a disturbed frown to Gurung's face. "Mr. Bishta said you told him the line should be moving faster."

"Yes, but, well…you don't just wave 'em in now, for Christ's sake! You still gotta get their papers and check the cars. Maybe you get some Iraqis down here, at least a translator, somebody who can speak Arabic. You get your bomb-sniffing dogs…"

Gurung's expression changed in the middle of the tirade. His focus went to someplace out over Tucker's shoulder and then suddenly he was walking away across the parade ground to intercept Jack Allstrong, who was jogging up. The two men stopped maybe twenty yards from where Tucker stood. After a short exchange of words, Allstrong put a quick, reassuring hand on Gurung's shoulder and then went past him as he strode toward the gate.

At this moment, Tucker, still in the middle of the road, holding up the flow of traffic, got another blast from the horn of the car in front of him. By now truly enraged, he put his hand onto his sidearm and pointed the index finger of his other hand at the car's driver-the warning explicit and eloquent.

Behind him, he heard Allstrong's relaxed voice. "Maybe you want to step out of the way and let my men do their job, Major."

Tucker whirled on him. "How can they do their job and question these people when they don't speak the language?" he said. Without pause, he went on, pointing to the commando team, now hard up against the back of one of the buildings. "But before anything else, you've got to call those men off. They can't conduct an offensive sweep."

Allstrong glanced over to them. "We were being fired on, Major. It's defensive. We have to protect ourselves, and we have every right to."

"Your men here tell me that nothing's been hit. Which makes me doubt there was much of an attack."

Allstrong pulled himself up to his full height, his usually affable expression suddenly harsh. "Maybe you missed the mortar attacks last month, Major, that punched holes as big as Volkswagens into the runways out here and killed four of my workers and wounded twenty more. Or the rifle fire that shot my office up and, oh yeah, killed another two of my guys." It was Allstrong's turn to point to the low-lying buildings. "That neighborhood over there is a breeding ground for attacks on this airport, and it's my job to stop them."

Tucker stuck his chin out. "There's no attack going on now, Allstrong. You either call your men back or I swear to God I'll personally intervene with Calliston and even your buddy Ramsdale to cut your funding off. We don't need wildcat contractors playing cowboys out here. You play by the rules or you don't play at all."

By this time, Gurung had come up near them. Allstrong glanced again at his commandos, then nodded to his employee. "Radio them to come on back in," he said. "Fight's over for today." Then, back to Tucker, "But that isn't why you came out here."

"No, it's not. I came here to inspect what our money's being used for. You realize that your gate guards here don't speak Arabic? How are they supposed to get information from these drivers when they don't speak the language?"

Allstrong shook his head. "These men are British-trained Gurkha guards, Major, the pride of Nepal. They're completely capable of handling this mission. I've tried hiring locals a few times and you know what happens? They either steal my shit or they don't show up, or both. They're afraid if they take a job with me, their families will get killed, and they're not all wrong. My guys are thorough and they get the job done. If it's a little slower than American standards, well, excuse me all to hell, but we're in a war here."

"What about the dogs? The bomb-sniffing dogs?"

"What about them? We're still training them. I've got sixty trainers and a hundred dogs working full-time out behind the terminals. When they're ready, I'll put 'em all to work. Meanwhile, again, I go with my guys."

"I'm going to want to see your kennels. And your fleet of trucks and cars that we've coughed up the money for. In fact, you can just look on my visit here today as an unannounced, informal audit to see if we've got to come back with a full-on inspection. I've got preapproval both from Calliston and the Inspector General of the Army."

"Good for you." Allstrong backed away a step and crossed his arms over his chest. "But I'm afraid I can't allow you inside the compound."

"The hell you can't."

"You watch me, Major. You're forgetting that I don't work for the Army. My contract is with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Jerry Bremer, through Kevin Ramsdale. I don't hear a Calliston in there, do you? Or a Tucker. And my bosses are happy enough with the job I'm doing that I'm getting almost more work than I can keep up with. So, look. You want to check up on me, clear it with Ramsdale. I've got nothing to hide, but I'm not showing my books to anybody who doesn't have permission to see them. So thanks all to hell for your interest, Major, but I'm afraid this trip's going to turn out to be a waste of your time." He turned to his worker. "Mr. Gurung, Major Tucker is not to enter the compound today or any other day without my permission. Is that clear?"

Gurung nodded. "Yes, sir."

Tucker glared at Allstrong. "I'm going to go to Ramsdale, and even Bremer if I have to," he said. "If I were you, Allstrong, I'd get my books in order. I'm going to be back with all the authority I need. You just wait."

"I'll look forward to it. Meanwhile, you have a nice drive back to Baghdad, Major. And keep your head down." Allstrong broke his trademark smile. "You never know."

Ron Nolan had arrived back in the compound earlier that same day, and now he and Evan Scholler sat on the steps to the chow trailer. A few minutes of natural sunlight remained in the hot August evening. Dust from the afternoon winds hung in the air, smearing it yellowish-brown.

"Dude," Nolan said. "I'm telling you. She's moved on. You ought to do the same."

Evan didn't argue with Nolan this time about whether or not he'd have another Budweiser. He'd already had three-cans this time, not bottles. He popped the top and lifted the next cold one to his lips. He wiped foam from his lips. "Was there anybody else?"

"What? You mean with her? Did I see anybody? Haven't we been through this already? No." Nolan took a pull from his can. "But we're talking about a total time in her presence of about three minutes, all of it at the door to her apartment trying to get her to just take the damn letter. If there was some guy inside with her, I didn't see him."

"So maybe-"

But Nolan cut him off. "Maybe nothing, Evan, don't do this to yourself. You had to see her face-great face, by the way, so I know where you're coming from and you've got my sympathy-but if you'd seen her face you wouldn't have any doubts. She didn't want anything to do with you or that letter. You want to hear it again? She says, 'I'm not going to read it.' And I go, 'You don't have to read it, but I promised Evan I'd get you to take it from my hands. You can do that, can't you?' So she goes, 'I'm just going to throw it away.' And I go, 'That's your call, but I've got to give this to you.' So she takes it, says thanks, and looking straight into my eyes, she rips the envelope in half."

Evan sipped beer and blew out a breath. "Fuckin'-A."

"Right. I agree, it's a bitch. But, hey, the good news is you don't have to wonder anymore." Nolan hesitated, sipped his beer, shot a sideways glance across the steps. "I don't know if you want to hear this, my friend, but I've got to tell you or you'll never know. She put a move on me too." Holding out a restraining hand, Nolan hurried on. "Nothing I couldn't handle and I very reluctantly gave her a pass, but if you needed any more certainty…"

"No, that ought to cover it."

"I hear you. But you know, give me certainty anytime. I can deal with that any day over not knowing."

"Maybe you're right."

"Damn straight I am."

Evan looked over at him. "She really came on to you?"

Nolan nodded, solemn. "And I didn't get the impression it was the only time since you've been gone. The girl's a stone fox, Ev. You think she's sitting home alone nights watching TV? Come on, she's human, life's short, and she's got a life back there. This isn't rocket science. You guys broke up before you came here. It's over. Accept it."

Evan hung his head. He couldn't seem to muster the strength to lift it up.

Shit, Nolan was thinking. Maybe the guy's not going to get over her. That possibility hadn't occurred to him. Nolan had told the small lie about Tara ripping up the envelope because he thought it made for a convincing story, brought the finality of Evan and Tara's breakup a bit closer to home. But now he saw that Evan might not accept it. He might keep trying to reach her again, might find out what had gone on in Redwood City, might even manage to snag Tara back away from him.

Nolan couldn't let that happen. He wanted Tara. He'd gotten her and he intended to keep her until he didn't want her anymore, which might be a very long time. However, Evan's reaction caught him off balance; now he'd simply have to adjust. Fine-tune the mission. Keep him away from her.

All was fair in warfare anyway. And the old saying was right: in love, the same thing. You needed to be willing and able to adjust to the unexpected.

Evan Scholler was stationed in a dangerous place, after all, where anything might happen to him. Nolan could tweak the odds just a bit, give Evan a little something else to deal with instead of Tara Wheatley.

He reached over and hit Evan's arm, hard but friendly. "You know what you need, dude? You need something to take your mind off all this, that's all."

"And that's always an easy call here at party central."

"Hey, there's things to do here. You just got to know where to look."

"Right."

"You doubt me?"

For an answer, Evan drank beer.

"The man doubts me." Nolan shook his head in disbelief. "Dude," he said. "Put your beer down. Come with me."

Evan took a beat, then tipped his can up, emptying the contents into his mouth. When he finished, he got to his feet. "Where we goin'?"

"Smoke-check party," Nolan said.

"What's that?"

"Smoke-check the Muj. You'll love it."

The spy for Jack Allstrong in the airport's adjoining neighborhood was an educated ex-Republican Guard officer, a Sunni named Ahmad Jassim Mohammed. No one knew the exact game he was playing, and this was no doubt the way Ahmad preferred things, but the pretense was that he had accepted the new, post-Saddam status quo and wanted to work with America and its allies to help rebuild his country. He'd gotten connected to Allstrong during the July mortar attacks on the airport, when under the guise of offering his services as an interpreter, he'd instead provided five thousand dollars' worth of information that had proved valuable in identifying several target houses in the airport's neighboring slum that had contained large caches of weapons, mortars, and other explosives.

Though no one, least of all Jack Allstrong, ruled out the possibility that Ahmad might in fact be a spy checking out airport conditions for the insurgents, and though the consensus among Nolan and the other executives at Allstrong was that Ahmad was using the American military presence to settle vendettas with his personal enemies among his former Republican Guard colleagues, the fact remained that his information tended to be correct. When the targets he'd provided were eliminated, the mortar attacks on the airport had abruptly come to an end. That was about as far as Allstrong or Calliston needed to take it. Allstrong had paid Ahmad for similar information several times now, and counted on the intelligence he supplied to keep a step ahead of the insurgency just outside his perimeter. And so far it was working.

No one had expected today's attack, but Ahmad had arrived at the compound in its aftermath. Now, in the sultry early night, he sat in the front seat of one of Allstrong's convoy vehicles. Ron Nolan was driving. Evan Scholler, in black fatigues, his Kevlar vest, and with four beers in his bloodstream, stood uncomfortably manning the machine-gun platform on the vehicle's roof. Behind him in the seats, two other black-clad Gurkha commandos checked their weapons.

The party rolled out of the main gate. Off to their right, they could sense, more than see, the slumlike contours of the mud-caked domiciles of the residents. A quarter mile or so outside of the compound, the Humvee veered suddenly right and began bouncing across the no-man's-land that separated the airport from the homes. Nolan killed the regular beams, leaving only the car's running lights on.

Evan squinted ahead into the night, unable to make out many details either to the sides or ahead of them. He wished he hadn't had those beers. He wasn't drunk, but he could feel the alcohol, and though Nolan had assured him that they faced little or no danger, just an awesome adrenaline rush, he'd also insisted that Evan wear his bulletproof vest, as all the others had done.

Evan thought he might in fact wind up needing all of his faculties, and couldn't shake a keen awareness that his reflexes might not be there for him in a pinch. So his mouth was dry, his palms sweaty, his head light. He was alone up here, half-exposed. Behind him in the car, he heard nothing-and that didn't help his nerves either.

What the hell was he doing?

In another minute, they'd entered the town itself. As they'd approached, Evan thought for an instant that the car might just try to crash through one of the yards, but evidently Ahmad knew where he was directing them. Suddenly they were in a street so narrow it barely fit them. It was lit only by the lights from within the houses, but the place wasn't dead by any means. The locals were outside smoking, talking-their Humvee picked up some kids, running along beside the car, whistling, calling out for food or candy.

The foot traffic forced them to slow down. Nolan honked from time to time, never stopping, forcing his way ahead, making the populace move out of his way. Evan, sweating heavily now, kept his hands gripped tightly on the handles of his machine gun, even as he heard Nolan call up to him. "Stay cool, dude. Nothing happening here. We're not there yet."

They turned left, then right, then left again, now down unmarked and unremarkable streets, into more of what looked like a marketplace area, closed up for the night, with few if any pedestrians. Nolan accelerated through the space and entered another quarter of the suburb. People still milled about, but less of them, and with far fewer children. Nolan made another turn and pulled up to a stop at a large open space in front of what appeared to be a mosque. Here the foot traffic had all but disappeared. The only light or sound-television and music-came from a two-story dwelling at the next corner down on their left.

The passenger door opened and Ahmad got out of the car, closed the door gently, then leaned back in the window and said something to Nolan. Then he turned and ran, disappearing into another of the side streets. Nolan killed even the running lights next, and then immediately they were moving, only to stop again sixty yards along, after they'd passed the house Ahmad had pointed out to them.

This time the engine went quiet. The radio music from the house was louder down here, providing cover for whatever noise they made as Nolan and his two commandos opened their doors and got themselves and their weapons out into the street.

They all gathered now down under and just to the side of Evan's position. They'd blackened their faces and hung grenades on their vests since they'd gotten into the Humvee and these two details chilled Evan, who could barely make out anything but Nolan's teeth in the darkness. He seemed to be smiling. "I'm leaving the keys in the car," he said to Evan, "in case you need 'em. You remember how we got here, right?" A joke, even in this setting. Nolan went right on. "If you need to, hop in the driver's seat and get out any way you can. But this shouldn't be long. And, hey, remember, we're in black, but we're the good guys, for when we come out."

Then he illuminated the light on the helmet he wore, as did the other men. All of these were clearly well-rehearsed maneuvers. At a nod from Nolan, the men broke into a trot toward their target. In an instant, one stood on each side of the door of the house. Nolan took a position in front of the door and, without any warning or fanfare, opened fire with his submachine gun. This knocked the door open and Nolan kicked it and led his men in.

Immediately, bedlam ensued. Screams and yelling, shots and sporadic bursts of automatic weapons fire, then the three men assembling outside again-Evan thinking it was already over-when the night was split by a shattering explosion out of the lower window. And the men rushed in again, this time into pure darkness.

Evan's knuckles tightened on the handles of his machine gun. Behind him, he heard a sound and whirled. He couldn't make the gun turn a full one-eighty, and he suddenly realized that if anyone were to come up behind him, he had no defense. Drawing his sidearm, he ducked down for a second below the backseat and peered back behind him, but there was nothing in the street. In the house across the way, the yelling and the gunfire continued-again individual shots followed by bursts of automatic weapons. Another explosion ripped through the night, this one blowing out the upstairs windows, and then suddenly all went quiet.

A few seconds later, the three men in black fatigues appeared outside the front door again. Two of them bolted back toward the car, while the third reentered the building, then emerged on a dead run just as his two colleagues got to the car. Behind him, in the house, two nearly simultaneous explosions blew out any remaining glass in the downstairs windows and halfway knocked him to the ground, but he kept running until he, too, reached the car.

By this time, Nolan was back in the driver's seat, breathing hard, starting the thing up. Over his shoulder, he yelled up at Evan. "That was the place all right. That Ahmad is okay. Must have been a dozen Muj in there, dude, maybe two hundred AKs. RPGs, you name it. But nothing that a few frag grenades couldn't cure. God, I love this work. How 'bout you? Was that fun or what? Hang on, we're rolling."

Behind him, fire and smoke were beginning to billow out of the building's windows. Evan couldn't take his eyes off the spectacle. He was vaguely aware of doors opening on the street around him, people pouring out into the night, more shouts, the screams of women. Behind them now, he heard the crack of what he imagined must be gunfire, but he saw nothing distinctly enough to consider it a target.

But then they had turned the corner and were headed back through the space in front of the mosque, then the marketplace. Evan swallowed against the dryness in his throat, his stomach knotted up inside him, his knuckles burning white on the handles of his machine gun.

8

A while after midnight, Evan tried to carefully and quietly navigate the three steps up to the dorm trailer. Between the news from home about Tara and his involvement in the raid, he figured he had every excuse in the world to split most of a bottle of Allstrong's Glenfiddich with Nolan after they returned to BIAP, and now the ground was shifting pretty well under him. He was looking forward to lying down on his cot. Tomorrow he'd try to process most or all of what he'd been through tonight, the aftermath.

He and his reservists had worked it out with the Filipino cooks and clerical staff and now had a dorm section of their own, eight cots in a double-wide bedroom. When he pushed open the door, the greeting was like a surprise party without anybody yelling surprise.

Suddenly all the lights went on, and these nearly blinded him, especially in his inebriated state. Stumbling backward against the brightness, his hands up in front of his eyes, he might have tripped on the steps and fallen back out of the trailer if one of his guys, Alan Reese, hadn't been waiting there to grab him.

As the glare faded, Evan blinked himself into some recognition. Facing him, some sitting on their cots, some standing, was his squadron. Marshawn Whitman, his sergeant and second-in-command, much to Evan's surprise, was standing at attention and even offered a legitimate salute before he began with a formality he'd never used before. "Lieutenant," he said, "we all need to have a talk."

Evan tried to focus so that he only saw one Marshawn, instead of two, looming there in front of him. He put a hand out against the doorjamb to hold himself steady. His tongue, too big for his mouth in any case, could only manage the word "Now?"

"Now would be best," Whitman said. "We need to get out of here."

"Where to?"

"Back to our unit."

"Our unit? How we gonna do that?"

"We don't know, Lieutenant. But being here just isn't right."

Evan, stalling for time, looked over first at Reese standing next to him, then around to Levy and Jefferson and Onofrio sitting forward on their cots, identical triplets-elbows on their thighs, hands clasped in front of them-and finally to Pisoni and Koshi and Fields, who were standing with their arms crossed, leaning against the wall. Whatever this was about, these guys were a unit, all of them in it together. And from the looks of them, all of them angry.

"Guys," Evan said, "it's not like we got a choice. They sent us here."

"Well, not really. They sent us up to Baghdad, then we wound up here."

"I'm not sure I see the difference, Marsh."

Corporal Gene Pisoni, a sandy-haired, sweet-tempered mechanic for a Honda dealership in Burlingame, and the youngest member of the squad, cleared his throat. "We could get shot at doing what we're doing here, is the difference, sir. They shot up this base today. We've just been lucky out in the streets up until now."

Next to Evan, Reese piped in. "The casualty figures posted today list a hundred and sixteen dead this last week in Baghdad alone. Our luck can't hold much longer."

Lance Corporal Ben Levy, a law student at Santa Clara, added to the refrain. "We've been here almost a month, sir. This was supposed to be a temporary assignment, wasn't it?"

Evan still felt the room swaying under him, but part of him was sobering up. "Well, first, our luck can hold, guys, if we just stay careful. But I'm not arguing with you. This isn't what we got sent over here for, I agree. I just don't know what we can do about it."

"Talk to Calliston." Nao Koshi was Japanese-American, a software engineer who'd been pulled out of what he'd thought was the world's best job at Google. "He assigned us here. He can assign us out."

"We shouldn't be doing this." A thick-necked Caltrans employee from Half Moon Bay, Anthony Onofrio was thirty-three years old. He had two young children and a pregnant wife at home. He was perennially the saddest guy in the group, but rarely spoke up to complain. Now, though, he continued. "This really is all fucked up, sir. They've got to have the trucks we're trained to fix at least down in Kuwait by now. We ought to be down there doing what we're trained to do, not standing up behind machine guns."

"I agree with you, Tony. You think I want to be here? But I thought you guys were happy to have regular quarters, regular meals."

"The guys we came over with," Marshawn said, "they've probably got that by now, too, wherever they are. Maybe better than we got it here. We're all willing to risk it. Huh, guys?"

A general hum of affirmation went around the room.

"Bottom line, Ev," Whitman continued, "is what Tony said. Us going out in these packages every day is just bullshit. We don't want to die driving Jack Allstrong or Ron Nolan around to pick up money."

"Nobody does, Marsh. I don't either."

"Well, the way it's going now," Whitman said, "it's only a matter of time."

Evan shook his head in an effort to clear it, then wiped a palm down the front of his face. "You guys are right. I'm sorry. I'll talk to Calliston, see what I can do. At least get things moving, if I can."

"Sooner would be better," Pisoni said. "I got a bad feeling about this. Things over here are heating up too fast. It's only going to get worse."

"I'm on it, Gene," Evan said. "Promise. First chance I get. Tomorrow, if he's around."

"Oh, and sir," Whitman added. "It might be better, when you get to see Calliston, if you were sober. He'll take the request more seriously. No offense."

"No," Evan said. "Of course. None taken. You guys are right."

As it turned out, Colonel Calliston did not have a free seventeen seconds, much less fifteen minutes, that he felt obligated to devote to the problems of a reserve lieutenant whose squadron was gainfully employed doing meaningful work for one of the CPA's major contractors. Finally, Evan took the guys' beef to Nolan, who listened with apparent sympathy to the men's position and promised to bring the matter up with Allstrong, who in turn would try to make a pitch to Calliston. But, like everything else in Iraq, it was going to be a time-consuming, lengthy process that might never show results anyway. Nolan suggested that, in the meanwhile, Evan's squadron might want to write to the commander of their reserve unit, or to some of their colleagues in that unit, wherever they happened to be in the war theater.

In the few days while these discussions and negotiations were transpiring, things in Baghdad -bad enough to begin with-became substantially worse, especially for the convoys. One of the KBR convoys delivering several tons of dinars in cash from Baghdad to BIAP was ambushed just outside of the city and barely limped into the compound with one dead and four wounded. The lead vehicle's passenger-side window was blown out, and the doors and bumpers sported dozens of bullet holes. The attack had been a coordinated effort between a suicide-vehicle-borne explosive device-an SV-BED-and insurgents firing from rooftops. The consensus was that the damage could have been much worse, but the Marines in the convoy had shot up the suicide vehicle and killed its driver before he had gotten close enough to do more significant damage.

Earlier in the week, another convoy manned by DynaCorp contract personnel had shot out the windshield of the Humvee carrying the Canadian ambassador as a passenger, when his car hadn't responded to a warning to stay back. Luckily, in that incident, because the contractors had used rubber bullets, no one was badly hurt. But nerves were frayed everywhere, tempers short, traffic still insanely dense.

By now, most of the routes in and out of the city had been barricaded off and access to those thoroughfares was nominally under the control of the CPA and Iraqi police/military units. All vehicles had to pass at least one and often several checkpoints to be admitted to these streets. Unfortunately, the inner city was a cobweb of smaller streets that fed into the larger main roads, and access to these was much more difficult to control. A convoy like Scholler's would be sitting in traffic downtown, essentially stationary, and a car with four Iraqis in it would suddenly appear out of one of these alleys and begin crowding the convoys in the slowly moving endless line of traffic.

Since many of these cars were in fact SV-BEDs, they, too, ignored escalation of the hand and audio signals in their efforts to get close enough to destroy the convoys they'd targeted. And of course, in these cases, the machine gunners standing through the roofs of the Humvees in the convoys had little option, if they wanted to save their own lives, but to open fire on the approaching vehicle.

Tragically, though, all too often the approaching car held innocent Arabic-speaking Iraqi civilians who simply didn't understand the English commands to back off, or the simple Arabic commands soldiers had been taught to give to help with the confusion. Or they failed to appreciate the urgency of the hand signals. In the first months after the occupation of Baghdad, these shooting "mistakes" had come to account for ninety-seven percent of the civilian deaths in the city-far more than the deaths caused by all the insurgents, IEDs, sniper fire, and suicide bombers combined. If a car got too close to a convoy, it was going to get shot up. That was the reality.

Nolan, scheduled for the rear car this Tuesday with Evan, picked right up on the bad vibe that had been riding along with Scholler's squadron for the past few days. Now, as he walked up to the convoy, he was somewhat surprised to see Evan outside his vehicle, having some words with one of his men, Greg Fields. Tony Onofrio, another of the guys, was standing by listening, obviously uncomfortable.

"Because I say so," Evan was saying, "that's why."

"That ain't cutting it, Lieutenant. I've been up there three days in a row. How about we put Tony on the gun today?" Fields was obviously talking about the machine gunner's spot, the main target popping out of the roof of their Humvee.

"Tony's a better driver than you are, Greg, and you're better on the gun, so that's not happening. Mount up."

But Fields didn't move.

Nolan had been aware that the unit's respect for Evan's leadership had declined over their recreational drinking coupled with Evan's inability to get them transferred, and now it looked as though Fields might flatly refuse his lieutenant's direct order. So he stepped into the fray. "Hey, hey, guys. No sweat. I'll take the gun. Greg, you hop in the back seat and chill a while."

Nolan knew that the men might also be mad about his own role in Evan's drinking, plus driving him all over to hell and gone, but figured that neither as a group nor individually could they resent him if he took a turn in the roof. Although this was technically forbidden.

Caught in the middle, Evan felt that he had to assert his authority. "I can't let you do that, Ron."

"Sure you can." He gestured toward the machine gun. "I'm a master on that mother."

"I'm sure you are," Evan said, "but you're only allowed to use a sidearm."

Flashing the smile he used to disarm, Nolan stepped up and whispered into Evan's face. "Dude, the other night ring a bell? That's not your rule. That's the recommendation for contractors. Nothing to do with you. I'm betting Fields has no objection." He turned. "That right, son?"

The young man didn't hesitate for an instant. "Absolutely."

"Fields isn't the issue," Evan said, even as the guys from the other Humvees were moving down in their direction, wondering what the beef was about.

"I'm the issue to me, Lieutenant," Fields said. "It ain't right, me being up there every day. If Mr. Nolan wants a turn, I say tell him thanks and let's roll out of here."

Evan didn't want this to escalate in front of his other men. Nolan was throwing him a lifeline that could save his authority and preserve some respect in front of his squad. And maybe what he said was true. Maybe it was a rule for contractors, and none of the Army's business.

"All right," Evan said at last, lifting a finger at Fields. "This one time, Greg."

Now Evan and his very disgruntled guys were in a Baghdad neighborhood called Masbah, where Nolan was to meet up and conduct some business with a tribal chief who was a friend of Kuvan. They'd already passed the checkpoint into the wide main thoroughfare that was now choked with traffic. On either side, storefronts gave way to tall buildings. Pedestrians skirted sidewalk vendors who spilled over into the roadway on both sides of the road.

But in contrast to many of their other trips through the city, today they'd encountered quite a bit of low-level hostility. Kids who, even a week before, had run along beside the convoy begging for candy, today hung back and in a few cases pelted the cars with rocks and invective as they drove by. Older "kids," indistinguishable in many ways from the armed and very dangerous enemy, tended to gather in small groups and watch the passage of the cars in surly silence. The large and ever-growing civilian death toll from quick-triggered convoy machine gunners-in Evan's view, often justifiable, if tragic-was infecting the general populace. And in a tribal society such as Iraq 's, where the death of a family member must be avenged by the whole tribe, Evan felt that at any time the concentric circles of retribution might extend to them-all politics and military exigencies aside.

Riding along with Nolan on the big gun above him, Evan was more than nervous. He honestly didn't know his duty. He hadn't been briefed on this exact situation and had no ranking officer above him to tell him the rules. Should he have stood up to Nolan and forbade him to man the machine gun, alienating himself from his men even more? Could he just continue to let him ride up there and hope the problem would go away? But playing into all of his ruminations was the fact that since the unauthorized raid into the BIAP neighborhood, everything about Nolan had him on edge.

The more Evan reflected on it, the less defensible that attack seemed, the more like some variant of murder. Evan had been a cop long enough in civilian life that he was sensitive to the nuances of homicide, and the raid had certainly been at the very least in a dark gray area. If the house that Nolan and his Gurkhas had trashed had in fact been identified as a legitimate military target, shouldn't it have been a military unit that took care of it? Though it was possible that the house full of AK-47s and other ordnance could have been an insurgent stronghold, Evan couldn't shake the thought that the attack might have been more in the line of a personal reprisal-payback to one of Ahmad's (or Kuvan's) enemies, or even to a business competitor.

Now, stuck in traffic in the passenger seat on a sweltering morning in Masbah, and still hung over from the previous night's beers, Evan tried to get his thoughts in order. He had to figure out a way to get his troops out of this assignment; he had to stop drinking every night with Nolan; he had to accept that it was over with Tara; he had to get a plan for his life when he got out of here.

He closed his eyes against the constant dull awful throbbing. In the driver's seat, Tony Onofrio must have caught his moment of weakness, because he turned the music way up to a painful decibel level-Toby Keith's new hit "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)." This was Tony's not-so-subtle punishment for the fact that Evan hadn't succeeded in getting them transferred yet. The other beautiful aspect of the earsplitting volume was that Evan couldn't acknowledge that it bothered him-to do so would be admitting to his hangover. Tony, of course, knew he had the hangover. The message was clear enough-if Evan could jeopardize all of their safety putting more priority on drinking than on getting them out of here, then Tony could play his goddamned music as loud as he fucking wanted.

But suddenly, all the cogitations became moot. They were moving along at about ten miles per hour and they had just passed a side street when Nolan slapped three times rapidly onto the hood of their vehicle. "Heads up," he yelled down with real urgency, "bogey at ten o'clock. Ten o'clock."

Instantly jarred alert-this was a situation Evan had been trained for-Evan hit his radio and passed the word up to the rest of his squadron. "Pisoni! Gene, any way to speed up?" Then he yelled at Nolan. "Hand-signals first, Ron. Back ' em off. Back 'em off!"

From the radio, he heard, "Negative, sir. We're stuck up here."

Nolan shouted, "Comin' on."

"Don't fire! Repeat, do not fire."

He knew that he had to see how serious the threat was before he could formulate his response. If nothing else, he needed to make sure that this encounter went by the rules of engagement, the escalated warning process. But on the other hand if it was a suicide bomber who had targeted them, it would happen quickly and he couldn't be afraid to pull the trigger. He drew his own sidearm, the 9mm Baretta M9, and, turning half-around in his seat, stuck his head out the window. Behind them, just out of the alley and pulling out ahead of the backed-up traffic in the space behind them, was a beat-up white sedan with no license plates. The rear car in all of the convoys already sported relatively large signs, written in English and Arabic, warning following vehicles to leave at least one hundred feet of space, and experienced drivers in Baghdad tended to err on the side of caution. And yet this car had entered the roadway at about seventy-five feet and was advancing.

Looking up, Evan saw that Nolan had drawn himself up to full height and was standing with both arms extended, palms out-the classic "stay-back" signal in any language. Trying to get a better glimpse of the car behind them, Evan stuck his body out even farther. With the sun beating down on the windshield, the view inside the vehicle was generally obscured, but Evan was fairly certain that he could make out two people in the front seats. The back window on his side was down as well, and he caught a glimpse of forearm for a moment, instantly retracted.

"There's three of 'em in there at least," he called up to Nolan. Then, into the radio again, "Gene, can you get to the side and go around? The sidewalk, even?"

"Clogged up, sir. Negative. In fact, slowing."

"Shit." Evan knew that they had a megawatt flashlight in the backseat for just this situation. He pulled himself back in and told Greg Fields, behind the driver's seat-who should have been up where Nolan was-to find it and shine it at the approaching driver's face. It was supposed to be for nighttime use, but it might do some good during the day as well.

Digging in his duty bag on the floor at his feet, Evan pulled out the airhorn klaxon they carried for just such a moment. Amazingly enough, it seemed that even this many months into the occupation, some people-even whole families-would simply take to the streets in their cars to go shopping or run an errand. They'd get to talking or arguing and never see the warning hand signals until it was too late.

Coming out the window again, airhorn in his hand, Evan looked quickly to the roof. Nolan had gotten down out of his extended position and now his palms were gripped around the handles of the machine gun. "Hold off, Nolan! Hold off! Wait for my order!"

The car had closed to under forty feet in ten seconds, and seemed to be accelerating. Like everywhere else in the civilized world, Iraq seemed to raise drivers who abhorred a vacuum between vehicles. Even in the bright sunshine, even with the glare off the windshield, Evan could see that Fields had trained his blinding light on the driver. From his own side, he held out the airhorn and let out a blast.

The radio squawked out. "Deadlock up here, sir. Slowing down."

Evan checked the position of the approaching car-was it, too, slowing down at last? Good, it had stopped in time, thank God. This crisis would pass. He reckoned that he had time for a quick look ahead of them. Turning, he was about to order Pisoni onto the sidewalk-the pedestrians would have to scatter and that was just too damn bad. Onofrio hit the brakes and they came to a complete stop.

All was still. Evan breathed a sigh of great relief.

And then, with a maniacal war whoop, right above him, Ron Nolan opened fire.

The car did not explode.

That alone was enough to cause Evan grave concern. That and the fact that in the seconds before Nolan had started shooting, the car had finally gotten the frantic message from the lights and airhorns and without a doubt had come to a complete halt. Only after the first hail of bullets had slammed into it had it started moving again-the dead driver's foot letting up its pressure on the brakes?-coming on, actually faster now, with Nolan continually pouring rounds into it, until it rammed into the back of Evan's car and shuddered to a stop.

"Don't leave the cars unattended!" Evan tried to keep his rising panic out of his voice. "Stay at the wheel! Man your guns! Who's riding shotgun in your car, Gene? Well, get Reese back here with us. Fields," he yelled at his assistant driver, "out with me!"

The street had first seemed to go eerily silent, but already now as he all but fell out of the car, Evan became aware of the upswell of volume that was growing around them. Back behind them, on the sidewalk, a man was screaming, keening, and there appeared to be a form down on the sidewalk next to him-one or more of Nolan's bullets had apparently hit a bystander as he or she was walking down the street. This was perhaps unavoidable once the shooting started, but it aggravated the situation terribly.

A man on the curb was yelling at him in English. "He was stopping! He was stopping!" Back at the shot-up sedan, Fields and Reese on the other side, Evan approached with great caution. Although the windshield was blown out and red streaks tinted the inside of the other windows, someone might still be armed and alive inside, or there might still be an unexploded bomb.

Evan came up to the passenger door, gingerly pulled it open, then spoke into the radio to Pisoni. "Gene. Get through to somebody somewhere and tell them about this. Give 'em our location and tell 'em we need support yesterday. Anything they can get to us."

Behind him, he became aware of more shouts, randomly laced with fury. He turned his attention to the body-a woman, judging by the bloodied shreds of the niqab, or veil, that now stuck to what had been her face. Now she sprawled partially out of the front seat, her upper body bleeding into the street. On the other side of the car, Fields had opened the back door and stepped back in disgust and horror. "Holy shit, Ev, there's kids back here."

A minute later, the first of the rocks hit his Humvee.

For perhaps ten minutes, though it seemed more like an hour, Evan tried to direct events, even through the bombardment of projectiles that the entire convoy was beginning to endure. He gave his machine gunners, including and especially Nolan, strict orders not to fire into the crowd. He hoped that the reinforcements that Pisoni had called for would arrive in something like a timely manner, and he entertained the hope that this wouldn't escalate further, at least until the cavalry showed up.

But he couldn't keep the crowd from closing in around the white sedan, some members of it clearly recognizing the family that Nolan had just slaughtered. As Evan and his men retreated back to their own bunched-up vehicles, they heard from Pisoni that Iraqi police units, stationed nearby, were on their way.

Meanwhile, though, some of the crowd members had laid down blankets in the street and begun the process of removing the bodies from the car. First the woman, then her husband, who'd been behind the wheel, finally the three children-by the size of them, none older than six or seven. All of them were badly bloodied, but one was apparently still breathing, and someone grabbed that child and disappeared with it into the crowd.

Nolan, still up behind his gun, now had his eyes on the street in front of them, which had cleared as the forward traffic had begun to move. "Evan," he said, and when Scholler looked up, he pointed. "Check it out."

Evan turned. "What?"

"We're good to go, dude."

"What are you talking about? We're not going anywhere. We've got a multiple fatality incident here, Ron. We stay till we're cleared."

"Bad idea, Lieutenant. We go while we can. These people will take care of their own, but we'd best be gone by the time word gets out around here."

"We can't be gone. We've got to report-"

"Report? To the local cops? And then what? No, man, what we've got to do is get out of here now, while we can, before it gets ugly and personal."

"Personal with us?"

"We killed 'em, Lieutenant."

"We didn't kill 'em, Nolan. You killed 'em."

"So split a straw. They're not gonna care. We're on the same side, is all that matters. This is a clan culture, so everybody in these poor fuckers' clan is honor bound to kill us. It's going to get personal in about two minutes, I promise."

Evan looked off down the street at the still-receding line of traffic that had been blocking their way all morning. Behind them, the horns of a hundred other cars urged him to drive off, clear the road, get out of the way. He didn't know how he could in any kind of conscience leave the scene of an incident such as this one-all his police training went against it. There would have to be an investigation, photographs, testimony taken. They couldn't just see an opportunity to get away and run from all this, could they?

From across the car, Fields said, "I think Mr. Nolan's right, sir. We've got to get out of here. We get back to an FOB someplace." Fields was picking up the jargon. An FOB was a secure troop area, or forward operating base, with Bremer walls, crew-served weapons, and security checkpoints. "We make our report out of there."

Evan didn't respond and instead went to his radio. "Gene," he said, "what's it look like for getting out of here?"

"When?"

"Right now."

"Decent. There's an off-road to a barricade point another quarter mile up, and I can-"

At that moment, a low hum filled the torpid air around them. Nolan yelled out, "RPG. Down!" And sixty feet from where Evan stood, the first Humvee suddenly exploded in a ball of flame, knocking him, Fields, and Reese to the pavement. Nearly deafened, Evan still registered that Nolan had come up out of his crouch and turned his machine gun to the building from which he believed the rocket-propelled grenade had been fired.

Gene Pisoni and Marshawn Whitman had just taken a direct hit that they couldn't have survived. Across the hood of Evan's own Humvee, Reese stood back into his view, the left half of his face awash in blood. He was trying to say something, motioning to Evan, but either he wasn't saying any words or Evan couldn't hear them through the deafening roar in his head. Fields, too, finally got to his feet, apparently unharmed, and pointed to the Humvee, then to the empty street yawning open before them, in an unambiguous gesture. It was past time for talking about it. They had to get out of there.

He was right. Now the second and third Humvees were open targets-possibly saved, Evan later realized, by their proximity to the white sedan or to the crowd that had initially gathered around it. But that wasn't any part of his consideration as he pointed Reese to the second Humvee and hopped into the third one just as a spray of bullets pinged off the street in front of them all, cutting across the hood of his vehicle. Nolan wheeled and fired into the buildings again.

Onofrio had his vehicle in gear and started forward. In the second Humvee just in front of them, Reese reached the open passenger door and half jumped, half fell inside, joining Levy, Koshi, and Davy Jefferson-a twenty-four-year-old In-N-Out manager from Sunnyvale-who was stationed on the machine gun. And perhaps because of fear, or maybe an understood complicity among the locals, Evan noticed the crowd had suddenly fallen back from around them, isolating them as targets even further. Up out of the roof of the Humvee in front of them, Davy Jefferson had opened fire at some rooflines as well.

Another spray of bullets kicked at the street between the two vehicles. Over Evan's head, Nolan fired another burst, which was followed closely by a terrifyingly close low humming vibration as another RPG somehow missed them and exploded into a storefront over on their left. Glass and stucco dust rained down over them.

Evan hit his driver's arm and pointed to the burned-out, still smoking remains of their #1 vehicle. He still could barely hear himself, although he was yelling. "Gene and Marsh! Gene and Marsh!" Telling Onofrio he wasn't going to leave his dead men behind to be mutilated by the mob, which was the way this scenario looked like it was starting to develop.

They pulled around next to their #2 Humvee and at Evan's signal, he and Fields jumped out into the street again. Evan motioned to Nolan and Jefferson, on the two still-working guns, to cover them as they ran to the destroyed, still smoking #1 Humvee. Whitman's charred and bloodied body had been blown clear out of his hole by the machine gun and now lay sprawled over the roof. Evan and Fields grabbed their fallen comrade by the arms and pulled him down, then began dragging him as fast as they could back to their vehicle.

For a few seconds, the firing ceased. Evan and Fields managed to load Whitman's body into the back of their car, then they turned and went to join Alan Reese, who had come out of the #2 Humvee and was trying to open the front doors to the first car and get Pisoni out. But the doors were still too hot to touch, as well as sealed shut. The windows, of course, had all been destroyed by the blast as well, so Fields leaned in on the driver's side and tried to get some purchase on Pisoni's lifeless body, but couldn't get it to budge.

"He's still got his seat belt on!" he called back.

The force of the grenade had all but knocked the back door on the driver's side off its hinges, and Evan was able to force it further open with a few kicks. They could get Pisoni out that way. Evan got Fields over next to him, put his shoulder to it, and had just started to push when more rounds of automatic weapons fire exploded from the roofs around them. Fields, at his elbow, made a sickening guttural sound, then spun around and collapsed to the ground in a sitting position.

On the other side of the car, Reese fired off a few useless rounds with his sidearm just as heavy automatic weapons fire began coming from the roofs of buildings on Reese's side of the street as well. Somewhere behind them, Nolan was firing continuously now, back and forth, side to side, from the roof of his vehicle, but when Evan looked over, hoping he might be able to direct some covering fire from the other Humvee, he saw that Davy Jefferson had disappeared and that bullet holes had pocked across the #2 windshield as well. If Levy and Koshi hadn't been hit in their front seats, it was a miracle.

"Alan!" Evan yelled to Reese. "Get around here on this side!"

Reese looked at him over the Humvee's hood and nodded. Turning, still firing his sidearm at the rooftops on his side, he made it nearly to the back side of the car before several more automatic rounds straightened him up, threw him up against the car's body, and dropped him out of Evan's sight.

His own gun drawn, Evan sat next to Fields's crumpled body on the pavement in the partial cover of the Humvee. Up to his left, he could make out a couple of running figures at the edges of the roofline, but Nolan was doing a decent job of keeping them down, stippling the fronts of the buildings they occupied, holding their fire to a minimum. But Nolan was the only machine gunner left and at his firing rate, he would soon be out of ammunition.

Evan nudged at Fields. "C'mon, buddy, we've got to move." He pushed at Fields's shoulder again and the man's body slumped all the way to the side on the ground, the front of his shirt soaked in red. Another burst of machine-gun fire shattered the air directly behind him, and Evan turned and saw that it was his own #3 Humvee, Nolan on the roof, coming around in the street and running its own screen between the buildings to cover him.

But he had three men down here at the #1 Humvee, and three more in #2. He could only guess at Reese's condition. Perhaps he'd only been wounded. He'd have to get around the Humvee here to check that out. And then still there were Koshi, Jefferson, and Levy, over in #2. He'd have to order Nolan and Onofrio to help him load the dead and wounded into the backseat and cargo area of the one working Humvee. He couldn't leave his men out here in the street.

It wasn't possible that he'd lost so many of them in so short a time.

And then his own Humvee pulled up, the back door open, Onofrio behind the wheel, frantically gesturing that he should jump aboard, screaming at him although Evan could barely hear him. It was his only chance, their only chance.

But here was Fields right at his side, bleeding to death if not already dead. There was no option but to try to get him in the car first.

"There's no time!" Nolan yelled down from the roof at Onofrio. "Keep driving! Go! Go! Go!" He fired a short volley up into the rooflines. "Move!"

It seemed like Nolan was urging-ordering!-Onofrio to save themselves and abandon Evan with the rest of the men. But his driver slowed the vehicle as it came abreast of Evan, looked over in panic and desperation, reached out a hand across the seat.

Nolan yelled from the roof. "Leave 'em, leave 'em, there's no time! They're gone!"

The Humvee stopped now, and Onofrio leaned over further and pushed open the passenger door, his hand outstretched. Evan reached around, trying to get ahold of Fields to pull him along. Getting a purchase on his squadmate's sleeve, Evan was halfway to his feet, his own free hand out to Onofrio's, when, deep in his bowels, he felt again the low hum of another incoming RPG.

It was the last thing he felt for eleven days.