by Richard Fox
Chapter 2
The brigade operations center went by many names. Some called it the Bridge because of the three levels of workstations arrayed like stadium seating, all facing a wall with a gigantic map showing the swath of Iraq the brigade “owned” and a quad bank of plasma TV screens. For those who spent the better part of sixteen- to eighteen-hour shifts seven days a week for the nine- month-and-counting deployment, it was the Pit. The junior enlisted Soldiers who worked in the brigade headquarters and did their best to avoid the many senior-ranking officers, those commissioned and otherwise, called it the No-Smile Room.
During the day the operations center was a teapot on the verge of boiling over. A single shooting match with insurgents, a roadside bomb explosion, or a mortar attack on any of the remote bases (or even on sprawling Camp Victory, where the brigade owned its own corner), and the teapot screeched with activity. Calls for fire support, casualty evacuation, situation reports, and intelligence assessments would rocket around the operations center as the brigade command team tried to control a battle it could neither see nor touch. The boiling teapot sputtered with activity until the wounded were recovered, the enemy broke contact, or harried route-clearance teams neutralized the bomb. Then, as if someone had snapped off the burner, the steam from the teapot subsided.
This night the teapot simmered. The graveyard shift had half as many Soldiers on duty as the day shift. Most passed the time watching movies illicitly added to the brigade’s intranet or crafting yet another untruthful e-mail for friends and family back home, assuring them that the war was faraway and that there was no danger. The battalion liaison officers rarely strayed more than arm’s distance from their phones and computers, ready for the phone call that would wreck an otherwise-quiet evening.
Despite the relative calm, Captain Eric Ritter was having a lousy night. Soon after his assignment to the brigade, some enterprising personnel officer had looked over his bio sheet and told the brigade commander Eric was fluent in Arabic. Instead of taking over an intelligence section at one of the battalions or working on the brigade staff, Ritter was promptly assigned to translation duty. There was an impressive backlog of evidence and sworn statements from Iraqi prisoners that needed to be translated, which was why he was up so late at night. And why he was engaged in a frustrating conversation with the brigade detainee manager.
“I’m telling you, this piece of paper isn’t a bomb diagram. It’s a homework assignment from an Electrical Engineering 101 course.” Ritter tapped a finger on a sheet of paper inside a plastic sheath marked EVIDENCE.
“Well, the interpreter that found the evidence is positive it’s instructions for making an IED,” Captain Joe Mattingly said. Improvised Explosive Devices were the insurgents’ deadliest weapon, and any Iraqi associated with them garnered special attention from American forces. His eyes were red but open thanks to the copious amounts of the oily coffee he drank, available from a dirty corner of the operations center. He had two piles of manila folders on either flank, each bearing the photo and information sheet of a scared-looking Iraqi on the outside.
“I read the sworn statement from that interpreter,” Ritter said. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t finish the Iraqi equivalent of middle school. Look, this is the only piece of derogatory information on this Iraqi, and it isn’t even legit. Why don’t we recommend his release and move on to the next file?”
Mattingly’s eye went wide at the suggestion. He cast a furtive glance toward the uppermost row of seating, where Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds held court. Reynolds was preoccupied, scowling at something on his laptop. “I know you’re new here, but let me explain how this works. Detainee review boards are nothing more than theater. All of these guys”—he patted the top of each pile—“will go to the prison at Camp Cropper. If their file is weak, like this aspiring student’s, they’ll be released in a few months.”
“Wait. What?” Ritter said. “This guy hasn’t done anything to us, but we’re going to send him to Cropper, where he’ll make friends with hard-core jihadis and come back home all pissed off that we sent him to prison? Explain this logic to me, please.”
Mattingly lowered his voice. “It’s all about our percentages. Every other week we report what percentage of detainees we send from our detention facility up the chain to Cropper. If the percentage is low, then Division assumes we don’t know what we’re doing out here. If our percentage is high, then we’re great Americans, and Division is pleased.”
Ritter kept his protests to himself. He was too new to the unit to fully understand the ins and outs of politics on the brigade staff. He could effect change once he knew the players and the game.
“Then why are we going through all these files if their fate is predestined?” he asked.
“So that when Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds makes the determination to send him to Cropper, I can tell him that the file was fully reviewed.” Mattingly scrawled some notes on the bottom of the detainee’s cover sheet and moved the packet to the smaller of the two files. “Every so often Reynolds will let one or two go. A one hundred percent rate would be suspicious. Maybe this guy will get lucky.”
“Good evening, gentlemen. How goes the labor?” Captain Jennifer Mattingly asked as she handed Styrofoam clamshells of food to her husband and Ritter.
“Slow. At least Hercules had a purpose and end state to his twelve tasks,” Ritter said.
“Hercules wasn’t in the United States Army. How was the mess hall?” Joe asked his wife.
“Madness. There’s always a run on grilled cheese sandwiches and cold fries this early in the morning,” she said as she pulled an energy drink from her cargo pocket.
“I’ll make the next run,” Joe said.
A phone rang, and a hush fell over the room. A lieutenant, one of the liaison officers from one of the six battalions making up the brigade, snatched up the phone before it could ring a second time. The entire room waited for the lieutenant to announce, “Attention in the operations center” and detail the life-and-death situation the brigade staff had to remedy. Conversation resumed as the lieutenant mumbled into the phone and reached for a pad of paper.
Ritter watched as the lieutenant’s hand trembled, his face pale. Ritter focused on the end of the lieutenant’s pen as it moved through the air. Learning how to transcribe another person’s writing was one of the first pieces of spy craft he’d learned from the Caliban Program. Using those techniques outside the bounds of a sanctioned operation was expressly forbidden, but Ritter didn’t give a damn about what they wanted. Not anymore.
The Caliban Program, a covert arm of the CIA, recruited Ritter soon after he joined the Army. Despite Ritter’s extensive international travel and near-native mastery of Arabic and other languages, the Caliban Program needed him because of his connection to an al-Qaeda operative that had kidnapped a CIA officer in Pakistan. After surviving his first field mission with the Caliban Program, they kept him on board until he “made a mistake and died,” as the team leader so gently put it.
The men and women of the Caliban Program were killers. Killers tasked with eliminating threats to the United States. While most of their targets were individual eliminations with little in the way of complications, the collateral damage from some of their missions included women and children. Ritter lasted three years before he’d had enough of the Caliban Program’s “ends justifies the means” way of doing things.
Ritter wrote down ten numbers before the lieutenant put the phone to rest on the table. The lieutenant didn’t hang up the phone; whoever was on the other end of the call needed information or guidance immediately and didn’t want to wait for a callback.
The ten digits weren’t a phone number; they were grid coordinates. Ritter plotted the grid on the operation center’s map board, where he saw a laminated picture of a Humvee tacked to the spot.
The lieutenant smoothed the front of his uniform with a nervous gesture and climbed the stairs to Reynolds’s perch. Reynolds, his attention still on
his laptop, ignored the lieutenant. The lieutenant almost spoke to Reynolds but balked. No one in the operations center spoke to Reynolds without his acquiescence; to do otherwise would trigger a loud and public dressing down featuring the worst in English profanity.
“Something’s up,” Ritter said as he wrote the grid on a yellow sticky note. He left his seat and made his way to the next-lower aisle.
The intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) section managed the brigade’s handful of unmanned drones. The video footage from the drones was streamed to the bank of plasma TVs across from the section, providing the operations center a real-time view of the battlefield. The officer in charge of the ISR night shift, First Lieutenant Cindy Davis, smiled as Ritter approached.
Ritter smiled back, doing his best to keep up the appearance of a friendly conversation. He kept the sticky pad cupped in his hand as he squeezed behind Davis. He knelt next to her, taking cover from Reynolds’s view.
Ritter slipped the sticky note onto the desk next to Davis’s mouse pad. “Act casual,” he said.
“Sure, this situation is totally casual,” Davis said.
“Once that lieutenant screws up the courage to speak with Reynolds, he’ll ask for permission for one of your drones to