The Death Trust

TWENTY-FIVE

The temperature soared the farther we got from the influence of those air-con units. Heat radiated up the stairwell from the open door below. It was just after 1400 hours — the hottest part of the day. The heat had a sadistic quality about it. I wondered whether it was antihuman or just anti-American. I recalled how unaffected the locals seemed to be by it and decided it was probably the latter.

Teddy, up in the main office, must have relayed the news that we were headed out because the courtyard was a markedly different place from the one we’d seen on our arrival. For one thing, the soccer game had been abandoned. For another, one of the pickup trucks had pulled away from the wall and four men were readying it for service, loading it up with ammunition for the door-mounted machine gun, the roof-mounted MK19 40mm grenade machine gun, and the Browning M2 machine gun sitting on top of a post rising out of the rear tray.

Parked in front was a modified Toyota 4X4 with its doors removed. M249 machine guns — one on each side — were mounted where the rear passenger doors used to be. They looked like postapocalyptic RVs, because I guess that’s exactly what they were.

“Teddy is going to try to get us logged in to the army’s patrol schedule — line us up with infantry and gunship support if things get rough,” said Ambrose. He frowned and put a finger to an ear. “Okay, we’re cleared in.” There was no need to relay this to the men, as they’d already received the same information over their tactical radios.

Ambrose drove and Masters took the front passenger seat. I sat in the back between two mountainous Fijians, our waist gunners. The islanders ignored me, turning their snarls to the outside world once they’d checked out the white boy sitting between them. I returned their hospitality. Ambrose fired up the Toyota and set the air-con to stun. We rolled out, past the guys with HKs looking left and right, either checking for threats, or, in the case of the man I’d first met, looking for that lost chromosome.

“What do you think of Baghdad so far?” Ambrose asked Masters.

“Three words: dangerous, dusty, hot,” I heard her say.

Those gorilla shoulders shrugged. “Yeah, that’s all true, but this place grows on you. They’s not all Loony Tunes, you know — the Iraqis. The crazies here are like them vocal minority people we get back home. They’s the only ones you hear about ’cause they got the loudest voice.”

Yeah, only here the vocal minority does all its talking with rocket-propelled grenades and Semtex, I thought.

Ambrose continued. “Iraqis are not so different from us. They love their country. Seeing invaders strutting around the place gets them pissed. How do you reckon we’d like it if one day the Canadians invaded us?”

“Don’t get me started,” I said from the back stalls.

“Don’t get him started,” Masters echoed.

Masters and Ambrose talked. I tuned out and tried to focus on the implications of what Ambrose had told us so far. The killings seemed to be mounting up faster than I could sprout fingers and toes to count them on. I wondered whether, buried somewhere in General Scott’s files, there was a copy of that original autopsy, the one done when Peyton Scott’s remains were delivered to the 28th Combat Support Hospital on the day he died.

I glanced out the window. We were on a main road with plenty of other traffic, heading in a northerly direction. The housing on either side of the road was not Baghdad’s finest. “When we first came in,” I heard Ambrose say, “the Iraqi resistance would warn the local people about IEDs by the roadside or packed into the Armco fencing. They’d write a warning in the local lingo on the road nearby. So the Iraqis would give these IEDs a wide berth, but we’d just blunder straight on into them. We’ve wised up now — and the result? More Iraqis get killed because warnings are no longer given. Fun and games.”

Well, games at least.

Masters and Ambrose continued their friendly chat. I wondered when they’d move on to discuss their favorite restaurants. Ambrose turned hard left and dove into a narrow lane between close-packed homes. Sensibly, the Iraqis were in the shadows, out of the direct heat of the sun. There were still plenty of kids around, playing soccer or chasing each other. It reminded me a little of home. Kids are kids all over the world. Ambrose slowed and used plenty of horn to clear the road. The Toyota was mostly ignored but a few fists were raised in our direction, accompanied by a shout or two. Clearly there weren’t many Iraqis who owned nice new Toyotas, with or without doors.

The streets got narrower and darker and we slowed some more. Fewer people were out on these streets. I caught the unmistakable stench of long-dead human, and then I saw the movement down a narrow alley darkened by deep shadows. Rats the size of rabbits squabbled with dogs over the remains. After Afghanistan, I was intimately familiar with this most acrid of smells. There the cold often hid death’s presence. Here, it was different. The heat stripped away any restraint. But cold weather or hot, the olfactory palate of a long-dead human being was as complex in its way as a fine French perfume, although, unlike the latter, definitely not to be worn behind the ears. I wished I’d taken the sergeant up on his offer and accepted some of that mint chewing tobacco.

Lying in these shadows was the corpse of someone’s father or son, wife or daughter. The stench and the loneliness brought back the memory of the airless cold and the image of slashing steel in Afghanistan.

I noticed that the dogs were hanging around in groups of three. These animals had long since ceased to be man’s best friends. Instead, they’d taken up employment in the Baghdad city sanitation department for the uncomplicated promise of all they could eat, free.

Despite the heat, a shudder went through me. I forced my attention back to the conversation Ambrose and Masters were engaged in. The former marine said, “We came to this part of town to search for weapons. Nothing out of the ordinary.” As he spoke, we burst out of the shadows and into bright sunshine with the Tigris beside the driver’s window. “We’d pretty much finished the patrol and weren’t expecting trouble,” he added over his shoulder. I leaned forward between the seats. “We were retracing our steps through the streets I’ve just taken you through, but found our way blocked by vehicle wrecks. I thought we’d just made a wrong turn but I was wrong.”

The river’s floodplain was below us on the left, on the other side of a low retaining wall. On our right were the brick and concrete walls of the local residents, built high to keep prying eyes away from the women.

Ambrose slowed the Toyota to a crawl. “We found ourselves here.” He pulled to the side and stopped. He picked up the microphone from the radio set mounted under the dash and called in our position. I glanced behind us. A couple of the men had jumped out of the pickup. They were moving to form a perimeter defense, checking the angles, their personal weapons pointing toward the sky. Ambrose grabbed Marlene and a backpack from the passenger floor and got out. Masters followed. One of the Fijians swung his legs to one side so that I could pass.

The heat bouncing off the concrete surfaces was intense, and the air was laced with the scent of a mound of raw sewage piled beside the road, upwind.

“We came down here in a convoy of four Humvees. Our minds weren’t on the job. We were hot, tired, and looking forward to getting back to the compound and then something hit us, and hard.”

“A land mine?” I asked.

“No, man, it weren’t no land mine,” Ambrose snorted. “You saying a land mine means you’ve seen Peyton Scott’s autopsy report.”

“Yeah, have you?” I asked.

He nodded. “Peyton’s old man showed me. The general. After Peyton’s body was shipped home, he came to see me, flew down from Germany…”

Bingo, I thought. The general’s missing days — more of them accounted for.

“…the autopsy report said Peyton had been killed by a land mine explosion — shrapnel wounds to the body, right?” Ambrose snorted again. “You ever been spritzed by a man’s brains, Special Agent?”

“No,” I said.

“I was standing beside him. We were talking. And then suddenly Scotty’s head was gone and my skin was cool. It was Peyton — atomized. All over my arms, my face. Y’know, his hands reached out to me. Can you believe that? Like he could see, but there was nothing to see with ’cause his brains were all over me. An image like that — it burns itself onto your mind.” He shook his head as he looked at the ground, no doubt seeing the image he couldn’t erase.

I nodded. I had my own memories keeping me company.

Ambrose dug into his backpack and produced a clear plastic bag. He held it up and said, “Anyway, it wasn’t no land mine. This is what killed him.”

I took the bag from his fingers and examined it. Inside were bullet fragments, something big and unusual.

Masters asked, “Where’d you get this?”

“We came back here the day after to check the place out — make some sense of what’d happened. There was a hole punched in the wall — you can see where it’s patched.” Ambrose ran his hand over a rough, unpainted section. “The round that killed Scotty did that. And then it smashed through a forty-four-gallon drum filled with stored drinking water on the other side. We found the remains of it — what you’re holding in the bag — in the bottom of the drum.”

“Jesus,” Masters murmured.

Masters was right to be impressed. It would have taken a hell of a lot of force to punch through into a steel drum after bashing through concrete.

“I think the round that took down our Humvee was different, maybe an armor-piercing incendiary round. It went through the radiator, shattered the crankcase. We didn’t look for that round — there wouldn’t have been anything left of it.”

“What would fire something like this?” Masters examined the bag.

“An AMR, an anti-material rifle,” I said. “Possibly a Barrett gun.” I’d seen Barrett guns in action in Afghanistan. From across the valley, I’d watched a team of Australian snipers clear a hilltop of giant scorpions from a mile away. It was a formidable weapon.

Ambrose agreed. “For what it’s worth, that’s what I reckon too.”

The fragment Ambrose had removed from the drum sure looked like the remains of an AP round — the tungsten penetrator. Also bagged were a few fragments of the copper jacket that would have peeled away when the round hit the wall. Whoever killed Peyton Scott wanted no mistake, but also wanted the body left relatively intact. It felt like we were getting lucky — having the forty-four-gallon drum in place to catch the projectile that killed him — but I didn’t want to say as much for the very reason that the bullet had gone through Ambrose’s buddy to get there. But, all the same, we were fortunate. We now had evidence literally in the bag, and Peyton’s DNA — specifically, his gray matter — could still be on the copper casing fragments. Of course, I didn’t mention that, either. With Ambrose’s eyewitness account to go with the fragments, we could call into question the authenticity of the Veitch autopsy report.

“You wouldn’t still have Peyton’s Kevlar, by any chance?” I asked. His helmet might still contain hairs, skin, and possibly blood fragments, all of which would contain his DNA. We’d need that reference to prove any DNA still present on the copper casing fragments was Peyton Scott’s.

Ambrose smiled. “Indeed, I do.” He opened the backpack. Inside was another clear plastic bag. This one contained a helmet.

I was officially excited. This was another genuine break. I accepted the backpack. “Can you tell me what happened next, after Peyton went down?”

“We started shooting up shit. We were as jumpy as hell. But there weren’t nothin’ to shoot at. Look around. It’s just the same now as it was that day. We called it in and a Black Hawk flew overwatch for a while, but, well, nothing…”

I looked around. The walls of the houses backing onto the street curved away with the floodplain. The sniper’s hide could only have been on the other side of the river, a good mile and a half away in the heat haze, but well within the range of a Barrett gun. “Any other shots fired?”

“None came back at us. One shot took out our vehicle. The next whacked Peyton. And no one even heard those shots.”

Most likely the shooter had buried himself in an abandoned building with a clear line of sight to this bend. The rifle was probably also equipped with a baffle — no muzzle flash and no sound to give away the shooter’s position.

“Was Peyton’s body medevaced out?” asked Masters, beating me to it.

“Yeah. We also had one walking wounded — leg wounds. Shrapnel from the hit on the Humvee.”

“You said you were retracing your steps through the streets, but you found the way blocked. You want to tell us more about that?” Masters asked.

Ambrose took a small map from his back pocket and spread it on the Toyota’s hood. “This was our route in and out.” He traced it with his finger. “By the time we pulled out, barricades had been set up here and here. When we came to a barricade, we tried to find another way around it — we didn’t want to break through them in case they were stacked with IEDs.”

“So you believe you were herded through this point here?” Masters said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That means you’re saying you think the whole thing was planned and executed—”

Ambrose didn’t like Masters’s disbelieving tone. He cut her off. “Yeah, that’s what I believe. Of all the men who were with Peyton on that day, I’m the last man standing. And now Scotty’s father — the general. He’s dead, ain’t he? That’s the real reason you people are here, ain’t it?”

I didn’t look at Masters, although I felt her eyes flick to me. “Yeah, that’s why we’re here,” I said.

The road was quiet. There weren’t even any dogs or cats slinking about. Ambrose’s men had formed a perimeter. They were watchful and patient, good soldiers whether wearing their country’s uniform or not. There was the faint hum of traffic floating across the river from the far bank, as well as the ever-present noise of helicopters, but nothing else. No bomb blasts, no tat-tat-tat of distant gun battles. Under the sun’s naked flame it was unbelievably hot and still. So why were chills crawling around under my skin? “You said General Scott came to visit you. What about?”

Ambrose walked toward the retaining wall and looked out across the Tigris. “It was a week after Peyton’s death. He wanted to know what had happened to his son. Like I said, he showed me Scotty’s autopsy. Cause of death was trauma from a land mine. I knew that was a lie, and because the general had seen his son’s body, he knew it was a lie, too. I think he just wanted Scotty’s murder confirmed by an eyewitness.”

“Do you think someone told him his son had been murdered?” I asked.

“I don’t know for sure — he didn’t say — but why else would he not have believed the autopsy report?”

I nodded. Yeah, why else?

“How long did he stay in Baghdad?” Masters asked.

“Just one day, I think. And he was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant colonel.”

“Didn’t you think that was odd?” Masters said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, ma’am, because a four-star tends to attract attention. Lieutenant colonels? Not so much. He wanted to be here incognito.”

“Did Peyton have any enemies?” I asked. There was that question again, the one that always gets an airing in murder investigations. I was expecting Ambrose to give the usual answer, but he surprised me.

“Yeah, I think he did have enemies — maybe the same ones his father had. Scotty began to talk about how he was in danger, how people might try to get to his father through him. We all laughed about that — we were in Iraq, for Christ’s sake, and every motherfucking one of us was in danger. So we thought he was just full of shit — mucking around, y’know? But now, with Scotty dead and all my men dead and his dad dead — and probably a lot more folks dead that I don’t know about, right? — well, I don’t think he was so full of shit, after all. Now I’m a believer.”

“A believer in what?” I asked.

“You ever heard of a group…a group that calls itself ‘The Establishment’?”