Carrie's run

CHAPTER 31

Al-Ta’mim, Ramadi, Iraq

It was the young Marine, Lance Corporal Martinez, who spotted it. A thin metal tube almost completely hidden under some debris in the middle of the street, just sticking out of the pavement.

“Probably pressure trigger,” he said. He had stopped their armored Humvee just two feet short of it. Another half second and they would have gone over it, and that would have been the end of her. They were all living on borrowed time, Carrie thought, wiping her forehead with her sleeve. The temperature was already in the high nineties. She wore an oversized Marine utility uniform with a desert camouflage pattern, her abaya and personal things in a backpack she kept next to her on the seat.

They were trying to make their way to the Government Center, where the regional Iraqi Provisional Government, protected by the 3/8 Marines-Third Battalion, Eighth Regiment-were headquartered in Ramadi. She had thought Ramadi was the deadliest place on the planet, but this part of the city was like something out of a World War II documentary. Not a single building was left intact; nothing was functioning, and nothing moved on the streets except a lone skeletal cat walking atop a pile of garbage. Everywhere she looked, there were shattered buildings, the rusting hulks of destroyed vehicles, debris and rotting garbage.

Martinez backed the vehicle up a few feet, then carefully drove around the metal tube, and they continued down the empty street. Virgil and Warzer, in the backseats, scanned the ruined buildings and rubble for snipers, while Carrie, in the front passenger seat, tried to hold it together, her hands trembling.

She had killed Dempsey, she kept thinking. The whole operation was crazy, but with the battle ramping up in Ramadi, Abu Ubaida about to move on Baghdad and all her doubts about Romeo, who was at the least a double agent, sending him down Highway 11 had to have been a suicide mission. If she had been tracking Romeo to get to Abu Ubaida, it was also possible Abu Ubaida might have been doing the same, using Romeo to track her and her team.

Except what else could she do? A pair of assassinations that would launch a civil war was about to start. Romeo wouldn’t have lied about it because if it didn’t happen, she would have destroyed him and his family just by having the Marines be nice and help them.

There was no choice. She had to get the intel to Langley. Nothing else mattered. Dempsey had been a Marine. He would understand that, she told herself. Only now Abu Ubaida and maybe Abu Nazir were within striking distance of their goal-and Dempsey was dead.

“Where? What happened?” she had asked Warzer, so stunned she could barely breathe.

“According to the Iraqi security force, it was just a few kilometers before the bridge into Fallujah. That empty stretch of Highway 11 between the Duban Canal and Lake Habbaniya. Something on the road made Dempsey slow down and when he did, they detonated an IED. They said it left a crater four meters deep in the highway. I don’t think there was much left.” Warzer grimaced.

Oh God, oh God, she thought. And then the question she couldn’t help asking.

“Any idea if it was random, or were they waiting for him?”

“No way to know,” Warzer said. “It could have just been bad luck.”

Except it wasn’t. Not when you were playing with a double agent like Romeo, who could feed intel about her, and possibly her team,directly to Abu Ubaida and maybe even Abu Nazir himself. Given that combination, how likely was it that it was random? The conclusion was inescapable.

I killed him, she thought. I am a disaster to anyone who gets near me. Dima, Estes’s marriage, Rana, even Fielding, and now Dempsey. Anyone. She felt like crawling into a corner and never coming out. The loss of Dempsey was a physical pain, like someone had stabbed her in the chest. Except she couldn’t collapse. Not now, not when everything, the entire war, was at stake. Hold it together, Carrie, she told herself. You can feel sorry for Dempsey and yourself later. You have no choice. No one here does-and neither do you.

They drove past a mosque with a pointed gray metal dome that was oddly intact, then turned up a rubble-strewn street. Up ahead, they heard the sounds of automatic weapons firing, and explosions.

Martinez stopped the Humvee and grabbed the SINCGARS radio handset. “Echo One, this is Echo Three. We’re at Red Zone Alpha,” he said. Then he listened and said, “Romeo that. Light the fire, we’re coming in.” He looked back at the others. “Hang on, folks. It’s gonna be like the Fourth of July.”

Martinez put the Humvee in gear and they lurched forward. He stepped on it and they began bouncing over ruts and rubble, pointing at a big rectangular concrete building in the middle of a wide open space. In front of it was a high wall of sandbags. That has to be the Government Center, she thought. Every building on the street approaching it was a total ruin, some with what was left of bedrooms exposed, with dangling scraps of bedsheets and broken picture frames on walls.

As they raced up the street, Martinez gunning the Humvee, the buildings suddenly came alive with flashes of weapon fire and the staccato rattle of AKMs shooting at them, bullets pinging on the steel armor plate. Carrie scrunched down in her seat, thinking, There’s no way we can make it through this. An RPG round exploded in front of them as Martinez swerved, the windscreen suddenly stippled with shrapnel chinks. A bullet went through the open window, barely missing her face.

At the same time, there was an answering roar from the Government Center as Marines at the sandbag barricades and from the windows and roof of the big building poured withering fire on the buildings where the insurgent fire was coming from. There was the loud percussive boom of a big gun. The wall of a building near them exploded in a hail of brick fragments. The AKM that had been firing at them from that building fell silent.

“That’s the Abrams,” Martinez said, talking about the big gun. He floored the gas pedal as they barreled toward a narrow gap in the sandbag barricade and shot through. Martinez whipped the Humvee into a radical ninety-degree turn and pulled up in the shadow of the barricade. By the side of the building, Carrie saw the M1 tank, whose big gun had fired the shot at the building. It had probably saved her life, she thought as they got out and ran inside the building.

Even before they got inside, Carrie was assailed by the powerful stench of urine, rotting garbage and unwashed bodies. She could hear the hum of a generator providing an undercurrent to the almost constant sound of gunfire punctuated by explosions. The Government Center was full of Marines, some at window openings, the windows long since gone, firing at the hulks of shattered buildings surrounding the square. A few Iraqi officials, in unpressed suits, moved like ghosts among the Marines, some of whom, despite the gunfire, slept where they were on the hard tile floors. Others stepped around the sleeping Marines as they worked.

One Marine beside a window opening paused from shooting to eat from an MRE while two other Marines came down the stairs carrying a heavy bucket on a pole that, even wrapped with plastic, reeked of fecal waste.

“Sorry for the stink. No running water,” Martinez said to them. “Commander’s office is on the second floor.”

“Thank you, Lance Corporal,” Carrie said, heading up the stairs. The Marines stopped what they were doing, looking at her as though she was a creature from another planet. As she continued up the stairs, someone gave a wolf whistle.

She almost responded, but the thought of Dempsey smacked her hard, like pain from an amputated limb. Inside she was nauseous, shaking. Was it her meds? I can’t do this, she thought, then realized, There’s no choice. I have to. It wasn’t just the mission, it was the war itself.

She asked for directions from a couple of Marines on the second floor, who just stared at her, then pointed to an office. A hand-lettered sign taped on the wall read, “Lt. Colonel Joseph Tussey, CO Third Battalion, Eighth Regiment, USMC.” There was no door. Carrie, followed by Virgil and Warzer, knocked on the wall and walked in.

Tussey, sitting behind a metal desk, was a trim, medium-sized man, about five eight, his thinning hair cropped in a USMC high-and-tight, his eyes the pale blue of Arctic ice. On the wall next to him was a map of Ramadi with colored pins in it. His look, when they walked in, suggested they were as welcome in his office as a plague of locusts.

“Good morning, Colonel. I’m Carrie Mathison. This is Virgil Maravich and Warzer Zafir. We were working with-” She was about to say “Captain Dempsey” but couldn’t get the words out. It was all she could do not to cry like a girl in front of this grim-looking Marine officer.

“What the hell are you people doing in the middle of a battlefield?” Tussey said. “My men don’t have time to play nursemaid.”

“We don’t need hand-holding. But I am going to need a number of your men and some support, including a drone,” she said.

“I don’t know who the hell you think you are coming in here, but we’ve got a battle on our hands and the only thing I’m going to allow you people to do is hunker down till we can figure a way to get you the hell out of Ramadi-and my hair. Dismissed,” he growled, and started typing on his laptop computer.

Warzer started to leave but Carrie motioned to him to stay. After a minute, Tussey looked up.

“Why are you people still standing here? I said ‘dismissed,’ ” he said, raising his voice.

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” Carrie said. “But I’m going to need some help. At least a couple of platoons or more. And communications. I need secure communications to Baghdad and Langley ASAP.”

“Look, Miss whatever-the-hell-your-name-is, get out of my office now or I’ll have you locked up. And if you think this shit hole smells bad. .”

Carrie motioned for Virgil and Warzer to go outside. She waited till they walked out, then came around the desk and stood right in front of him.

“I understand your situation, Colonel, and believe me, I’m not interested in a pissing contest with you. But before you throw us into whatever passes for detention in this dung heap, let me just pick up a radio handset and I’ll have General Casey, commander of Coalition forces, directly order you to cooperate with me. Besides, when you hear what I have to say, you’re going to want to give me everything you can.”

Tussey exhaled slowly. “Well, ladybird, I’ll say this: you got balls. Sit down,” he said, gesturing at a metal folding chair, and she sat.

“My mission is classified, Colonel. But as of seven hours ago, we located the leaders of AQI, Abu Nazir and Abu Ubaida, the men who are the leaders of the people trying to kill your men this very second. They’re west of here, in the porcelain factory in al-Ta’mim District on Highway 10. Give me the forces and we can kill them,” she said.

“Just like that?” he said, snapping his fingers.

“Just like that,” she said.

“How do you know they’re there?” he asked.

“We have a double agent, an officer in AQI, inside. They brought him in to be questioned by Abu Nazir himself. We tracked him by a cell phone we gave him.”

“Abu Nazir? The Abu Nazir?”

“Yes.”

“And Abu Ubaida too? How do you know he’s there?”

“I saw him myself in the souk yesterday. We also bugged our double agent’s house. Abu Ubaida is the one who came to take him in.”

“You saw him? In the market? An American woman wandering around like a tourist-and you’re still alive?”

“I was wearing this.” She pulled her abaya out of her backpack to show him. “A woman in an abaya is invisible to a lot of men in this part of the world, Colonel. You’d be surprised.”

“Possibly.” Tussey grimaced. “Seven hours is a long time. They could be all the hell the way to Syria by now.”

“Except if they want to interrogate him, it takes time. They’re still there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the cell phone hasn’t moved,” she said, leaning forward. “Come on, Colonel. Give me some Marines. Abu Nazir and Abu Ubaida are smart as hell. Without their leadership, these mujahideen shooting at you and your men are clueless. They’ll fade away.”

“Maybe the cell phone hasn’t moved because they left it behind. Maybe your man inside is dead. Maybe it’s a trap.”

She didn’t answer right away but looked at a jagged opening in the wall behind him that had once been a window. It was bright with sunlight, the day getting hotter. The stench from below because of the lack of toilets was indescribable. How the hell do they stay here? she wondered.

“Maybe. Very possible,” she admitted. “But Abu Nazir and his right-hand killer, Abu Ubaida, are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. This is the best shot at them we’ve ever had.”

“Who did you say you were working with as liaison?” he asked.

“Captain Dempsey. Ryan Dempsey, USMC,” she said, unable to suppress a quaver in her voice. “Task Force One Forty-Five.”

“I know him. Where is he? Why isn’t he with you?”

“He was killed this morning. Highway 11 outside Fallujah. I just found out myself an hour ago,” she said, her hands trembling. “I have urgent intel to get to Langley and USF-I headquarters and we had no cell or Internet communications. It’s my fault. I killed him.” She clenched her jaw and had to try to force herself to stay under control. “It’s not going to be for nothing.”

He stood up.

“Like a Marine,” he said, and touched her shoulder with his fist as he walked past her to the map to study the location of the porcelain factory on Highway 10 in al-Ta’mim District. He looked back at her. “How many men does Abu Nazir have with him at the factory?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Could be ten; could be a hundred.”

“I can’t give you a couple of platoons. Truth is, I can’t even spare a fire team. But I’ll give you a squad. That’s two fire teams. Probably lose half of them within two blocks of here,” he muttered.

“What about a Predator?” she asked. A Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles would help even the fight, even if all they had was a Marine squad of eight men.

“That’s you clandestine types or the Air Force. If you’re such a hotshot with USF-I HQ as you claim, you ought to be able to order one up. But if I were you, I’d hurry. The hajis have been stepping up their attacks exponentially. There’s something big coming, and soon. Real soon,” he said.

The porcelain factory, what was left of it, was a sandstone shell of a building on a big empty lot about a kilometer south of the Ramadi Barrage, the steel and concrete dam on the Euphrates Canal. There was a chicken-wire fence atop a concrete berm with gaps in it that ran all around the factory grounds. The day was hot, a touch of breeze blowing dust in from the desert.

Carrie was with Sergeant Billings, a big Montana ex-ranch hand with shoulders the size of Yosemite’s Half Dome, on the ground-floor ruins of a destroyed house across the road from the factory. The sergeant had deployed himself and one fire team of infantrymen with them, facing the factory, and the second fire team behind the concrete and chicken-wire fence on the opposite side of the factory. He had positioned his light machine gunner in an armored Humvee with another Marine as the driver, defiladed in the rubble behind their position. When the shooting started, they were to use the Humvee to block the road to prevent any attempts by the terrorists to escape.

Except where were the mujahideen? she wondered. If Abu Nazir and/or Abu Ubaida were in there, there should have been armed al-Qaeda insurgents swarming all over the place. But there was no one. What had gone wrong? Had it taken them too long to get here?

And yet, they were in there. They knew this because Virgil had activated software on Romeo’s cell phone that enabled them to eavesdrop on anything being said near it. The range was limited to within a meter or two of the cell phone. And what they were getting was an interrogation.

Virgil had handed Carrie an earbud connected to his laptop so she could listen in. Someone-it could have been Abu Ubaida or even Abu Nazir himself-was asking Romeo questions. Romeo’s answers were interspersed with screams.

“This woman was a CIA sharmuta whore?” she heard the questioner say. To Carrie, it sounded like Abu Ubaida’s voice from the video in Walid’s house.

“She never said so, but yes. She implied it,” she heard Walid say. It was his voice. She was certain of it.

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know. Aieeeee!” Walid screamed.

“What was her name?”

“Aieeeee! Please! If I knew I would tell you. I swear,” Walid babbled.

“Don’t blaspheme! What was her name?”

“Aieeeee! Please! Aieeeee! I only knew her code name. Zahaba. Please, no more. Please, brother.”

“Why gold?”

“The color of her hair. She was a blond. I only knew her code name.”

“Describe her.”

“American. Long blond hair. Eyes blue. Height about one point six five meters. Slim. Weight, perhaps fifty kilos, not more.”

“What did she want?”

“Information about you and Abu Nazir. Anything I could give her, but I told her nothing. Nothing!”

“You lie,” the questioner growled, and there was the sound of screaming. It went on for a long time. She took the earbud out. So the interrogator was Abu Ubaida. No question. “Information about you and Abu Nazir,” Romeo had said. He could only have been talking to Abu Ubaida.

“What do you think?” she asked Virgil and Warzer, both of whom were lying prone on the ground, scanning the factory across the road with binoculars.

“You’re hearing what I’m hearing. They should be there.” Virgil grimaced. “But I don’t see a damn thing. It’s wrong. There’s something wrong.”

“We took too long to get here. There should be al-Qaeda all over the place. At the least, they should have someone watching the road. There isn’t anyone,” Warzer said.

“So you both think it’s a trap?” she asked.

Virgil nodded. So did Warzer.

“Sergeant?” she asked, turning to Billings, who squirted a brown stream of chewing-tobacco spittle on the bricks in front of him.

“This is Indian country, ma’am. When you don’t see the Indians, that’s when you gotta worry,” Billings said.

“It’s unanimous,” she said, looking at them. “That’s what I think too. We call in the Predator?”

“You realize, if Romeo’s still alive in there, he’s a dead man,” Virgil put in.

Carrie thought about that. About Walid; his wife, Shada; his children, Farah and Gabir, who would be fatherless; his mother. I’m death, she thought. I bring death to everyone I touch.

“Romeo’s al-Qaeda. The bastard was dead the minute I met him,” she said.

Billings, grinning at that, motioned to PFC Williams, a skinny African-American twenty-year-old who was the radio operator. Williams handed the radio handset to Carrie and showed her where to press the button.

“This is Thelonious One. Come in, Cannonball,” she said into the handset. At her request, they were using jazz code signs.

“Cannonball here, Thelonious One,” said a crackled voice via the encrypted satellite link.

“You have a go here, Cannonball. Do you. .?” She looked at PFC Williams, who mouthed the word “Romeo.” Ironic, she thought. “Do you Romeo?” she said into the handset.

“Romeo that, Thelonious One. Watch yourself.”

“Will do. Out,” she said, passing the handset back to Williams and putting her arms over her head, scrunching herself down into the rocky floor as low as she could go. Next to her, she sensed the others doing the same. The seconds ticked agonizingly slowly as they waited for the attack.

This wasn’t what she’d anticipated when she’d contacted Saul from the Government Center building via the Marines’ AN/MRC satellite radio. She’d first tried his office number, but when no one picked up, she called his cell. Checking her watch, she saw it was a little after ten A.M. Three in the morning in Virginia. Saul picked up on the fourth ring.

“Berenson,” he said. She could hear the sleep in his voice.

“Saul, it’s me,” she said.

“Are you where I think you are?” he asked. She assumed he meant Baghdad.

“Worse,” she said, and told him her intel and what she needed, including the Predator drone authorization from the USF-I HQ, the U.S. Forces-Iraq, General Casey’s headquarters. “Can you stop you-know-who from coming here?” She meant Secretary of State Bryce.

“It might be too late. How the hell did they find out about that?”

“Remember your training story about crabs?” she asked, referring to something he’d said to their class years ago during training at the Farm, that in a closed intel environment, you had agents crawling over each other like crabs in a basket. “When that happens,” he’d told them, “a secret is harder to keep inside than diarrhea.”

“Can you stop it?” he asked. She assumed he meant the assassinations.

“Have to. Saul-Dempsey’s dead.”

For a long moment there was silence on the line. Ask me if I killed him, she thought. Ask me. Finally, he said, “What about you? How’re you doing?”

“Good. I’m good,” she lied.

“You’re a tough girl.”

“Saul, I’ve seen him. With my own eyes.”

“Alpha Uniform?” AU, Abu Ubaida. “What about the big guy?” Abu Nazir.

“Just the first. We’re close.”

“What about your Joe?”

“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” she said.

Her memory of the conversation was suddenly interrupted by a shattering explosion in the factory across the road, sending debris and smoke flying, shaking the ground under them. Seconds later, the factory was hit by a another, equally powerful explosion. Then nothing.

Her ears were ringing, the smell of explosive was all around them and when she lifted her head, all she saw for a few seconds was thick smoke and dust. Through the smoke, she could just make out that the factory across the road was almost completely gone. The roof that had still been on top of the building, the bullet-pocked, crumbling walls-all gone. Nothing was left but pieces of the fence and rubble.

Virgil was saying something but she couldn’t hear him through the ringing in her ears. He stood up and motioned to her to follow. She understood. They needed to get to the warehouse and identify the bodies. See if they could confirm who they’d killed.

After all this, God, I hope we got Abu Ubaida, at least. Abu Nazir would be a miracle. It would make all of this worthwhile, she thought as she, Virgil, Warzer and the two Marines, Sergeant Billings and PFC Williams, jogged across the road, weapons held ready to fire, all of them looking left and right to watch for any mujahideen.

They made their way gingerly into the smoking ruins of the factory. Fragments of concrete and porcelain and machines everywhere. Above them, no roof, only the blue sky obscured by smoke. And yet, there was somebody talking in Arabic. At first, she couldn’t make out the words. As she moved toward it, she heard the sounds of the interrogation they had been listening to on Virgil’s laptop. The interrogator’s voice and Romeo’s screams. Then Warzer shouted. They went over and she immediately understood. It was the charred, headless torso of a man; by his clothes, an Iraqi. A few feet away, they found the head perched on rubble, scorched on one side, but otherwise intact.

Romeo. In what was left of his mouth, someone had shoved the cell phone. Next to the head, a scorched Sony digital recorder still played the sounds of the interrogation.

“Contact him. Aieeeee! He’ll tell you. .,” Romeo’s voice cried out from the recorder.

“Of course he will. What good is that? I need you to tell me.”

“But he’s-ahhhhhh!” he moaned.

Virgil reached down and shut it off.

“Ya Allah,” Warzer murmured.

Carrie’s mind was racing. Who would tell them what? This was something new. But what? She went back and touched Romeo’s body. Rigor had well set in.

Usually rigor mortis kicked in after four hours or so, but in the heat of Iraq once the sun came up, it would have sped up, she mused. Bottom line, Romeo was likely killed last night around 0200, 0300. Meanwhile, the others looked around, kicking over the twisted steel remains of machines, crunching over rubble, but there were no other bodies.

“What the hell?” Virgil said, taking off his utility cover and scratching his head.

For Carrie, looking at the jumbled debris, there could no longer be any doubt. It was a trap.

“Get out! We have to get out now! Run!” she shouted. The two Marines started back toward the road from where they had come. “No! The other way!” she shouted.

Suddenly, as if by magic, mujahideen fighters came up out of the ground from camouflaged holes around the factory where they had lain hidden. In buildings and ruins across the way, scores more mujahideen appeared, their AKMs blasting at them. Sergeant Billings and PFC Williams briefly returned fire, then turned and ran after Carrie. As they raced toward the far side, Carrie saw an RPG rocket flash by and she just had time to dive to the ground as it exploded, fragments shredding what was left of a porcelain sink.

The dinging sound of bullets ricocheting off pieces of metal and the steel support posts of a roof that was no longer there ripped through the air around them like metal wasps. She got up and ran on, running like when she was in college, conscious of the others lumbering behind her. There were bullets everywhere. It was impossible not to be hit, she thought.

A machine gun opened up somewhere behind them on the road. Thank God, she thought. The two Marines in the Humvee were firing at the mujahideen who were now coming into the factory after them.

Ahead, she could see one of the Marines from the other fire team in position behind the concrete and chicken-wire fence on the other side of the factory. He was waving them in as the other Marines in his fire team laid down covering fire with M4s, rifle grenades and a light machine gun. From behind she heard shouts and curses in Arabic as the mujahideen running into the factory were cut down by the Marines. She was beginning to think they might make it when she heard Virgil cry out from behind her.

“I’m hit!” he shouted.