Carrie's run

CHAPTER 27

Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq

They were at a small table at the BCC, the Baghdad Country Club. A white cinder-block house with blue trim on a residential street near the river, it was one of the few places in Baghdad where the booze flowed freely. The club was packed with Green Zone expats who came here instead of the bars at the Al-Rasheed or the Palestine Hotel because with the Shiites trying to form a government, the hotels didn’t openly serve alcohol.

There were men in uniforms from a dozen different Coalition countries-Brits, Canadians, Aussies, Poles, Georgians, U.S. embassy and Provisional Government officials-and contractors from private military companies like Blackwater, DynCorp, KBR-Halliburton and a hundred others. More and more, the war had been subcontracted to these private companies and they had practically taken over. The bar and adjoining rooms were crammed with their employees, hired from every corner of the earth at Wall Street-like wages, speaking dozens of languages and spending money like it was going out of style. Jet planes taking off couldn’t have matched the noise level, and female waitresses who didn’t mind a pat on the butt could make a thousand dollars a night.

Carrie was sitting with Virgil and Dempsey, who was really a Marine captain on loan to the CIA, using the USAID office cover, from Task Force 145, a shadowy outfit fighting the insurgency.

Joining them was an Iraqi national, Warzer Zafir, officially a translator for the U.S. embassy, unofficially also from Task Force 145. The Iraqi was mid-thirties with dark hair, a three-day stubble, a straight nose sharp as an ax blade. Also attractive, Carrie thought. At the table next to them, a trio of Aussies was loudly celebrating an Australian cricket victory over “those donger South African whackers, mate.”

“I speak Arabic. I don’t need a translator,” Carrie had told Dempsey back in his office.

“Warzer has other virtues,” he said.

“Like what?”

“He’s from Ramadi,” Dempsey said.

“What about Ramadi?” Carrie asked.

Now, at the BCC, draining a Heineken, Dempsey told them:

“You guys need to understand what’s going on. Iraq’s changed since you were here last. Over the past two weeks, more than three hundred bodies, most burned, tortured beyond recognition, have shown up here in Baghdad alone. Our troops are getting it from all sides. IEDs and snipers on every block. It’s hard to tell who the Iraqis hate more, us or each other.

“The Sunnis will never accept Jaafari as prime minister.” He leaned closer. “This insurgency has legs. AQI is getting stronger. They’re on the verge of taking over Anbar. We’re talking from the outskirts of Baghdad all the way to the Syrian border. People are scared shitless. Last week, two U.S. Army Rangers from the Seventy-Fifth went missing in Ramadi. An hour later they turned up minus their heads.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Carrie said. “You’ve seen the photo. Do we have anybody who’s seen him?”

Both Dempsey and Warzer shook their heads.

“Even if somebody did recognize him, they’d never talk. What you Americans don’t understand,” Warzer said, “is that it’s not like Democrats and Republicans. If the Shiites take over, they’ll kill all the Sunnis. They fear if we take over, we’ll do the same. Saddam was a pig,” he said, his face contorted, “and I’m glad he’s been caught. But when he ran things, only some people died. Not everyone.”

“I need someone from AQI. I heard you had a prisoner,” she said to Dempsey.

Dempsey nodded. “While I was with the Seventh Marines, before all this spook shit, we captured an AQI commander in Fallujah. But they’re tough to interrogate. They’re not only not afraid to die, they want to die.”

“What’s his name?”

“He goes by Abu Ammar,” Dempsey said.

“That’s his kunya, his nom de guerre, not his name. Interesting he chose Abu Ammar,” Carrie said.

“Why?”

“Yasser Arafat used it. Ammar was a companion of the Prophet. Maybe our ‘Father of Ammar’ has delusions of grandeur. Where do you have him?”

“Abu Ghraib.”

“The same place they did all the tortures and stuff?” Virgil asked. Two years earlier, leaked photographs of U.S. servicemen and women torturing and sexually humiliating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison had been a worldwide political disaster for the United States.

“When you’ve seen what I’ve seen. .,” Dempsey said, then shrugged, as if Iraq were quantum physics, impossible to explain to laymen.

“Have you bugged his cell?” Carrie asked.

Dempsey shook his head.

“Shit.” She frowned. “Does anyone have a clue what his real name is?”

“We have a snitch in there. Swears our Ammar is from Ramadi, which makes sense, and that his real name is Walid. We don’t know his last name.”

“Why does Ramadi make sense?” she asked.

“Because it’s the heart of the insurgency. It’s rumored that’s where Abu Nazir is.” He leaned closer. “I have to tell you, CENTCOM is planning a major operation in Ramadi,” he whispered in her ear.

“When?” she whispered back.

“Soon. You don’t have much time.”

“So no one’s seen Abu Nazir or Abu Ubaida?” Virgil asked.

“They say if you see them,” Warzer put in, “it’s the last thing your eyes ever see.”

Dempsey looked around and motioned them closer. They all leaned in.

“So what’s next? We go to Abu Ghraib for you to interrogate Ammar?” he said.

“No,” she said. “Ramadi.”

“Forgive me, al-Anesah Carrie,” Warzer said. “But you are a little new in Iraq. Ramadi is. .” He searched for the word. “You cannot imagine how dangerous.”

“We’ve already seen how dangerous Baghdad is,” Virgil said.

Warzer looked at Carrie and Virgil with his dark brown eyes. “Baghdad is nothing. Ramadi is death,” he said quietly.

“We have no choice. I need to talk to his family,” she said.

Dempsey grinned. “There’s one born every minute,” he said.

“What? A fool?” Virgil asked.

“Worse,” he said, still grinning. “An optimist.”

From the open door to her balcony at the Al-Rasheed Hotel, she could see the lights atop the Fourteenth of July Bridge over the Tigris River. The half of the city on the other side of the river was in pitch darkness, the power more often off than on, the curving river a silver ribbon in the moonlight.

From beyond the Green Zone she heard the crump of an explosion and the rattle of automatic weapons. Looking that way, she saw a line of red tracer bullets, trailing dreamlike across the darkness. The shooting stopped, then it started again, as much a part of the night sounds of this city as police sirens and cleaning trucks in an American city.

She went back in her mind to the same old question: What was Fielding’s secret? What had he been hiding? Why did he kill himself?

Why does anyone? Why did her father try? Where in this night was her mother? Wasn’t her leaving also a kind of suicide, a killing of her old life? Was that why she had never tried to contact any of them, not even her own children? Saul was right, she thought. We’re all hiding something.

When her father finally got on clozapine, he tried to reconnect. It was as if she had never really known Frank Mathison, the Frank Mathison who had been in Vietnam-and she hadn’t even known that about him till she found a photograph in a box in his closet, him shirtless, looking incredibly young and skinny, cradling an M14 in a jungle clearing with two friends, all of them grinning at the camera, shitfaced on whatever they were smoking, the Frank Mathison her mother had married before it all got really bad. He had moved in with her sister, Maggie, and Maggie’s husband, Todd. He was in therapy, basically normal now, according to Maggie.

“He wants to see you,” Maggie had said. “He needs to reconnect. It’s important for his process.”

“His process? What about mine?” she’d snapped.

She wouldn’t let him get close. If she saw him at Maggie’s house, she’d say, “Hello, Dad,” “Good-bye, Dad,” and that was all. Because she couldn’t forget; her bizarre childhood a Ping-Pong match between gibberish and silence. And because he might seem normal, but she knew the craziness was hiding in him, waiting to get out the second you turned your head away.

And what about her? Her craziness?

Son of a bitch, she needed a drink. And jazz. She got her iPod ready. Just then, there was a knock on the door.

It was Dempsey, filling the doorway. Still in his service shirt and pants, a few drinks further to the wind than he had been at the Baghdad Country Club. The way he looked at her thrilled her to her core-Damn, he was a good-looking man.

“I want the truth. Are you married?” she asked.

“What difference does it make?” he said, not taking his blue eyes off her.

“I don’t know, but it does. Are you?”

“I’m between,” he said, as if marriages were military assignments, temporary postings, and then you moved on to the next.

“Oh shit,” she said, the two of them coming together like atoms smashing, tearing off their clothes as he came into the room, kissing each other like the world was ending. They stumbled to the bed and as she wrapped her legs around his hips, feeling him push himself inside her, some part of her heard a pair of loud explosions this side of the river followed by a renewed outburst of automatic-weapons fire.