Carrie's run

CHAPTER 26

Route Irish, Baghdad, Iraq

Demon was talking under the metal arches in the waiting area at Baghdad International Airport. A stocky ex-military type with an Alfred E. Neuman gap between his front teeth, he was dressed in desert BDUs with a pirate skull and crossbones painted on his armored vest and the word “Demon” on his military helmet. He wore no shirt under the vest and his gym-built arms and neck were covered with cobra and devil-face tattoos. Like the other members of their Blackwater company escort team, he wore an ammo belt with extra magazines and a pair of hand grenades hanging like deadly fruit across his chest, an M4 carbine cradled in the crook of his arm.

Although it was before nine in the morning, Carrie was already sweating. The temperature was over ninety degrees on this early April day and it felt like it was going to get a lot hotter. Like the others, she was wearing an armor vest and Kevlar helmet and awkwardly carried a Blackwater-issued M4, a weapon she had never touched before. Virgil, next to her, looking equally uncomfortable, wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve.

It had been seven months since she had been in Iraq, but the heat, the private military companies, the sense of war the minute you flew in brought it all back almost as if she had never left, as if Beirut had never happened. Hard to believe it had been less than two months since it had all started with Nightingale’s attempt to kidnap her in Beirut. The ninth of April now. Back in the States, spring break, April Fool’s, tax season and the end of March Madness. As if she were on a run, where time seemed both compressed and endless simultaneously. Back in Iraq now, she thought grimly. Only this time she had a lead.

During the layover in Amman, she’d gone to the ladies’ room in the airport, where a female agent from Amman Station, an attractive young Arab-American woman, had slipped her an encrypted cell phone under the stall partition and she’d used it to call Saul.

“What about the thing I gave you?” she’d asked him. Nightingale’s cell phone.

“Still working on it. After every time he met Rana, he called the same cell number in Iraq.”

“Where?”

“All over. Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi. Last one was Ramadi.”

“So do we think that’s where Abu you-know-who is?” she whispered into the phone.

“Ubaida? Yes. Carrie?”

“I’m here.”

“Watch yourself. You’re in the red zone.” Things must really be bad if he thought he had to warn her, she thought. From the news on TV she knew the war, which had been bad when she had left Iraq, was amping up. Or was he warning her about something else? Like a major escalation or AQI op?

“Saul, is something coming?”

“It usually is,” he said.

Demon was briefing them on what to expect on the drive into Baghdad’s Green Zone from the airport. They stood with a group of contractors for Blackwater and other security companies and a pair of CNN reporters who’d just flown in with them from Amman.

“Listen up. I’m only gonna say this once and I don’t give a shit if you listen because you may not be alive long enough for it to matter,” Demon said in a way that let Carrie understand he’d given this speech plenty of times before. “It’s only six miles from here to the Green Zone. It’s a flat, mostly straight route on the Airport Road, a.k.a. ‘Route Irish’ for you newbies, a.k.a. ‘RPG Alley’ for those of you who are actually paying attention. We’ll be there in ten minutes. No big deal, right?” He grinned, showing the gap in his teeth.

“We’ll be in two convoys of five vehicles each. Each will have three armored Chevy Suburbans and an armored Blackwater Mamba truck with an M240 machine gun on the roof in the lead and another Mamba to bring up the rear. Now, some of you new people,” he said, looking around at them, “may be thinking this is all a bit of overkill. Some of you may look at our big fat-ass American vehicles and feel a little safer with all that steel plate welded on them. Trust me, with the amount of RDX explosive our little jihadi brothers use, the armor around you is about as effective as tissue paper.

“Each of you will be assigned a field of vision to watch as we go. Keep your eyes open. Do not fire your weapon unless I yell ‘Fire!’ I mean it. If I do tell you to shoot, you better do it or I’ll shoot you myself. Now, at this point, some smartass might be saying to himself, ‘This is bullshit, Jack.’

“Okay, bullshit. But just for the record, yesterday there were twenty-one attacks on American convoys on this same road. We had two fatalities. But today, you lucky people, is the day before the big Mawlid al-Nabi holiday. The birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. So we can expect the ragheads to up the ante. By the way, it’s the Sunni holiday, so in addition to attacks on us, we can expect explosions and car bombs at Sunni mosques and markets. Five days from now is the Shiite version of Mawlid al-Nabi and we get to do the whole damn thing all over again. Briefing’s over. We’ll either get through or we won’t. Any questions?”

He looked at them. A couple of the contractors shuffled their feet, but no one said anything.

“Okay, boys and girl”-he nodded to Carrie, the only woman-“get ready for the longest ten minutes of your life. Let’s get the hell outta here,” he said, and turned and walked away. After a moment, they followed him outside the terminal. The gray Mambas and black SUVs were lined up at the curb in the blazing sun.

Rabbit, an ex-marine with cropped peach-fuzz hair, told Carrie and Virgil which SUV to get into and where to sit and gave them their field-of-fire assignments. They were in the second convoy. Carrie’s seat was in the middle row, right side.

“What are we looking for?” she asked Rabbit. She’d done this before, last time she had been here, but from everything around her, it was clear things had changed.

“Any vehicle that doesn’t stay the hell away from us. Anything. Women, kids, a pile of garbage where it shouldn’t be,” he said. “If anyone comes close, yell ‘imshi.’ It means-”

“I know what it means,” she snapped.

“I’ll bet you do.” He nodded.

She checked her M4. It was loaded with a standard thirty-round magazine. The safety selector lever on the left side was on “Safe.” She brushed a fly off her face and hoped to God she wouldn’t have to use it.

Waiting at Beirut airport and on the flight to Amman and the second flight to Baghdad, Virgil next to her reading a paperback, she’d mostly listened to John Coltrane on her iPod, cool romantic tracks like “Body and Soul,” and thought about Fielding’s suicide. The question was why. It couldn’t have been because of what was waiting for him at Langley. Fielding was the kind of asshole who had always gotten away with things his whole life. He would’ve figured he’d find a way out of this too. So why had he done it? What was he hiding? And what did it have to do with Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir?

The SUV and the Mambas were loaded up and waiting. Rabbit was sitting in front of her in the “shotgun” passenger seat. Although the air-conditioning was on, the SUV was hot with the windows partially rolled down, their weapons poking out. The radio crackled. She heard Demon’s voice say, “Keep your eyes open and your sphincters tight. Let’s roll.”

The lead Mamba started to move forward and their SUV followed right behind it, the Mamba’s Blackwater company flag, black with a white bear’s paw, flying from the open roof-hatch cover. The convoy circled on the access road and headed for the airport gate. Carrie could see it up ahead through the windshield. The gate was heavily sandbagged, with concrete barriers that forced vehicles to make sharp back-and-forth turns before they could enter the airport. It was operated by Blackwater guards in full body armor manning machine guns.

A sign next to the gate read, “Leaving Airport Zone. Condition Red.” Virgil leaned over and whispered in her ear that “Condition Red” meant weapons ready to fire. As they approached the barrier arm across the road, Demon’s voice crackled over the radio:

“Lock and load, people. Safeties off. No tourists on this bus.”

There was a sound of clacking as everyone racked the charging handles on their weapons. Carrie moved the lever from “Safe” to “Semi” instead of “Burst” as she’d been shown. This is insane, she thought. She had no idea how to use this weapon and she wasn’t sure she could hit anything.

They drove out of the airport onto a highway surrounded by desert. Right out of the gate she saw palm trees, trunks blackened and tops sheared off by explosions. Along the side of the highway was a long column of twisted wreckage, the charred and blackened remains of SUVs and trucks. Just by the amount of debris, it was clear that things had gotten a lot worse since she had been here last. A wide highway divider with flat ground, scrub and palm trees separated them from oncoming traffic.

Their SUV sped up. They were moving faster now, about sixty miles per hour. Carrie wiped the sweat out of her eyes. Along her side of the road was more of the same. Charred chassis of vehicles, mangled palm trees and scrub. In front of them was the lead Mamba, with someone on top manning the machine gun and ahead, the road, partially obscured in the distance by a yellow veil of dust. Stirred up, she assumed, from the first convoy, a couple of minutes ahead of theirs.

“Overpass ahead,” Rabbit said over his shoulder. “Get ready. The hajis like to drop grenades and IEDs down on us. Eyes open. You won’t see them till they pop up.”

“Mother,” Virgil muttered, throwing a look at Carrie indicating he didn’t like this any more than she did.

They drove under the overpass, every nerve in her body expecting something to come down on them. As they came out of the shadow, she looked back but didn’t see anyone. She was about to draw a breath when the radio crackled again.

“Get ready, people. IED Junction. Here’s where the fun starts,” Demon’s voice said.

“Always something at least once a day here,” Rabbit said, hunching over his weapon.

Carrie saw what he meant. A number of cars entered onto the highway from a feeder road. One of them, a taxi with two Arab men wearing checked kaffiyehs in the front seat, pulled toward them.

“Imshi! Get away, dammit!” Rabbit shouted, and fired a warning burst right in front of the taxi’s front bumper, gesturing for them to back off. The taxi driver glared at them, but slowed and pulled away. Ahead, the lead Mamba was honking its horn constantly, but she couldn’t see at what. Then she saw the Mamba deliberately bump into the rear of a car in front of it and watched as the car pulled over to the side of the road to get out of the way.

Now she saw that one car after another was pulling over to the side of the highway to let their convoy by, the Iraqis in them watching them from the side of the road, their expressions unreadable.

They passed under another overpass, training their weapons up at it, and then another. There was a crater in the road from a past IED explosion and the convoy slowed to go around it.

Suddenly a woman in a black abaya with two little boys appeared on the side of the highway ahead of them, near the wreckage of a car that hadn’t been cleared away yet. She was holding a basket. They were in Carrie’s field of fire.

“Two o’clock! Woman with a basket and children!” she called out. The woman beckoned at them, holding the basket toward them. My God! she thought. Was there an IED in the basket? She didn’t know what to do.

“Don’t fire yet,” Rabbit shouted as they trained their weapons on the woman and the two children. What is going on here? Carrie thought. What are we doing?

“Balah!” the woman cried, waving at them as they slowed to go around the wrecked car.

“Wait!” Carrie cried. “She’s selling dates!”

“Don’t shoot!” Rabbit shouted.

Carrie moved her finger away from the trigger. As they passed, the smaller of the boys waved at them. This place is surreal, she thought, her heart beating like a snare drum.

They slowed again at a highway checkpoint formed by APCs and manned by Iraqi Army soldiers watched over by a pair of U.S. Marines. The Iraqi soldiers waved them through with hardly a glance and they sped up again. A highway sign read, “Qadisaya Expressway.”

Suddenly, she heard an incredibly loud explosion and saw a massive orange fireball blossom a few hundred yards ahead of them. A blast of heat and a whiff of explosive came back at them like a hot wind.

“Shit,” Rabbit murmured.

“What is it?” Carrie asked.

“Convoy ahead of us,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

A minute later, they had to slow to drive around the shattered hulk of an SUV exactly like theirs, completely engulfed in flames, emitting a thick, acrid column of black smoke hundreds of feet into the air. Next to it was the smoldering hulk of another destroyed vehicle, nothing left of it but the chassis. Car bomb, Carrie thought automatically as they maneuvered past. She could feel the heat of the flames on her skin. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of explosive.

Because of the flames, she couldn’t see anyone inside, but there was a man’s arm lying yards away on the highway. They were going to drive right past it, maybe over it. Nauseous, she forced herself to swallow to keep from throwing up. As they drove by, she couldn’t take her eyes off the severed arm. It lay there, palm up, the fingers perfect, untouched, even relaxed looking. Two Blackwater men were carrying a third man, his upper body drenched in blood. They brought him to an SUV stopped in the middle of the highway, its door open.

It must’ve just happened, she thought, sickened and suddenly reminded of the way it had been for her in Iraq before, that this place was for real; she could die any second. She was suddenly terrified. And yet, she felt more alive than she had ever felt in her life. Each pore of her skin was like a receptor sensing every atom in the air around her.

This is like one of my flights, she thought. This was true insanity. And yet. And yet. This was who she truly was.

As they started to speed up, the M240 and the M4s from the right side of the Mamba in front of them opened up. Everyone on the right side of the Mamba, her side, was shooting. Following the flight of the machine gun’s tracers, it looked like they were firing at the roof of a sandstone-colored building about a hundred meters from the highway. God, she thought, seeing a flash of fire from there. Someone was shooting at them.

“Snipers. Fire, dammit!” Rabbit shouted, firing his M4 at the roof of the building as well.

Carrie tried, but she couldn’t see who was shooting at them, though her nerves screamed in expectation of a bullet hitting her at any second. The harsh rip of M4 bursts from Rabbit and the man behind her sounded unbelievably loud in her ears. She put her finger on the trigger, not knowing what to do as they drew opposite the building. Then she saw it.

She could see the outline of someone up there and before she realized what she was doing, she squeezed the trigger blindly, feeling the M4 move in her hands. She squeezed off another, the shots sounding very loud, although she was positive she hadn’t come near hitting whoever it was. Before she could even see what happened, they were speeding away. She felt a terrible urge to urinate and tightened to hold it in. She put the safety selector back to “Safe.”

After what seemed like an hour but must’ve been barely a minute later, they exited the highway, the lead Mamba honking and bumping into Iraqi cars to get them out of their way as they headed toward the Green Zone checkpoint. The streets were crowded with cars and motorbikes and people. Through the window came a smell of dust and diesel and rotting garbage.

The checkpoint was ahead of them: concertina wire; concrete blast walls, some decorated with graffiti; sandbags; concrete turn barriers in the roadway; a queue of cars and a long line of people going through inspection and metal detectors to get in, watched over by an M1 Abrams tank and a detachment of U.S. Army soldiers. They snaked their way around the serpentine turn barriers and stopped briefly at the checkpoint, where a contractor who looked exactly like a soldier except for the Blackwater shoulder patch on his shirt waved them on through.

Passing by the blast walls, it was as if they had landed on another planet. They were on a wide avenue lined with palm trees, villas with green lawns and gardens, monumental buildings with pointed domes like something out of The Arabian Nights and, in the distance, the sun shining on the Tigris River. They drove past a monument with giant crossed curved swords over the entrance to what looked like a vast parade ground. Near it was what looked like a big concrete flying saucer with its hatch open. She remembered it from her last trip, but Rabbit, assuming she was a newbie, pointed it out.

“Monument to the Unknown Soldier,” Rabbit said as they continued on down the avenue, finally turning left past some government buildings in grassy open spaces, then right onto Yafa Street and pulling up at the entrance to a tall building with a dry fountain with statues in front that sooner or later, every foreigner who wasn’t tied down in the military got to know: the Al-Rasheed Hotel.

“Do you want to check in or go over to the Convention Center?” Virgil asked as they unloaded. The Convention Center was where the Iraqi Provisional Government and U.S. government agencies had offices.

“Convention Center,” she said, checking the safety was back on and handing her M4 to Rabbit.

“You did good,” he said.

“I was scared to death,” she said.

“Me too.” He grinned and waved.

She and Virgil, pulling their rolling suitcases behind them, walked across the wide boulevard and showed their IDs to U.S. Marines stationed behind sandbags outside the Convention Center building’s wrought-iron and concrete fence. The Convention Center was a giant fortresslike building made of gray concrete. It looked like a fortification from World War I.

They showed their IDs again to American MPs manning the entrance and went inside. Instantly, they were hit by the air-conditioning, and after asking, they eventually found an office with a sign on the door that said “USAID Baghdad,” the U.S. government aid agency. They knocked and went inside.

They were shown to an office waiting room, where they sat and waited while a young American man in a Marine Service C uniform shirt and tie, military written all over him, went to get someone. A U.S. Marine captain, also in Service Cs, came out of an inner office.

He was about six feet tall, athletic, good-looking, with dark wavy hair longer than the normal Marine’s, blue eyes and a Tom Cruise smile.

“I’m Ryan Dempsey. You must be Virgil and Carrie. Welcome to the Sandbox,” he said, shaking their hands. When he touched her hand she felt a tingle like nothing she’d experienced since the first time she’d met her poly sci professor, John, at Princeton so long ago. It’s the adrenaline, she told herself, the thrill of surviving the drive, of being alive. But taking a good look at Captain Dempsey, she knew it wasn’t true.

Oh shit, she thought. I’m in trouble.