Betrayal dh-12

by John Lescroart

  Digging in his duty bag on the floor at his feet, Evan pulled out the airhorn klaxon they carried for just such a moment. Amazingly enough, it seemed that even this many months into the occupation, some people-even whole families-would simply take to the streets in their cars to go shopping or run an errand. They'd get to talking or arguing and never see the warning hand signals until it was too late.

  Coming out the window again, airhorn in his hand, Evan looked quickly to the roof. Nolan had gotten down out of his extended position and now his palms were gripped around the handles of the machine gun. "Hold off, Nolan! Hold off! Wait for my order!"

  The car had closed to under forty feet in ten seconds, and seemed to be accelerating. Like everywhere else in the civilized world, Iraq seemed to raise drivers who abhorred a vacuum between vehicles. Even in the bright sunshine, even with the glare off the windshield, Evan could see that Fields had trained his blinding light on the driver. From his own side, he held out the airhorn and let out a blast.

  The radio squawked out. "Deadlock up here, sir. Slowing down."

  Evan checked the position of the approaching car-was it, too, slowing down at last? Good, it had stopped in time, thank God. This crisis would pass. He reckoned that he had time for a quick look ahead of them. Turning, he was about to order Pisoni onto the sidewalk-the pedestrians would have to scatter and that was just too damn bad. Onofrio hit the brakes and they came to a complete stop.

  All was still. Evan breathed a sigh of great relief.

  And then, with a maniacal war whoop, right above him, Ron Nolan opened fire.

  The car did not explode.

  That alone was enough to cause Evan grave concern. That and the fact that in the seconds before Nolan had started shooting, the car had finally gotten the frantic message from the lights and airhorns and without a doubt had come to a complete halt. Only after the first hail of bullets had slammed into it had it started moving again-the dead driver's foot letting up its pressure on the brakes?-coming on, actually faster now, with Nolan continually pouring rounds into it, until it rammed into the back of Evan's car and shuddered to a stop.

  "Don't leave the cars unattended!" Evan tried to keep his rising panic out of his voice. "Stay at the wheel! Man your guns! Who's riding shotgun in your car, Gene? Well, get Reese back here with us. Fields," he yelled at his assistant driver, "out with me!"

  The street had first seemed to go eerily silent, but already now as he all but fell out of the car, Evan became aware of the upswell of volume that was growing around them. Back behind them, on the sidewalk, a man was screaming, keening, and there appeared to be a form down on the sidewalk next to him-one or more of Nolan's bullets had apparently hit a bystander as he or she was walking down the street. This was perhaps unavoidable once the shooting started, but it aggravated the situation terribly.

  A man on the curb was yelling at him in English. "He was stopping! He was stopping!" Back at the shot-up sedan, Fields and Reese on the other side, Evan approached with great caution. Although the windshield was blown out and red streaks tinted the inside of the other windows, someone might still be armed and alive inside, or there might still be an unexploded bomb.

  Evan came up to the passenger door, gingerly pulled it open, then spoke into the radio to Pisoni. "Gene. Get through to somebody somewhere and tell them about this. Give 'em our location and tell 'em we need support yesterday. Anything they can get to us."

  Behind him, he became aware of more shouts, randomly laced with fury. He turned his attention to the body-a woman, judging by the bloodied shreds of the niqab, or veil, that now stuck to what had been her face. Now she sprawled partially out of the front seat, her upper body bleeding into the street. On the other side of the car, Fields had opened the back door and stepped back in disgust and horror. "Holy shit, Ev, there's kids back here."

  A minute later, the first of the rocks hit his Humvee.

  For perhaps ten minutes, though it seemed more like an hour, Evan tried to direct events, even through the bombardment of projectiles that the entire convoy was beginning to endure. He gave his machine gunners, including and especially Nolan, strict orders not to fire into the crowd. He hoped that the reinforcements that Pisoni had called for would arrive in something like a timely manner, and he entertained the hope that this wouldn't escalate further, at least until the cavalry showed up.

  But he couldn't keep the crowd from closing in around the white sedan, some members of it clearly recognizing the family that Nolan had just slaughtered. As Evan and his men retreated back to their own bunched-up vehicles, they heard from Pisoni that Iraqi police units, stationed nearby, were on their way.

  Meanwhile, though, some of the crowd members had laid down blankets in the street and begun the process of removing the bodies from the car. First the woman, then her husband, who'd been behind the wheel, finally the three children-by the size of them, none older than six or seven. All of them were badly bloodied, but one was apparently still breathing, and someone grabbed that child and disappeared with it into the crowd.

  Nolan, still up behind his gun, now had his eyes on the street in front of them, which had cleared as the forward traffic had begun to move. "Evan," he said, and when Scholler looked up, he pointed. "Check it out."

  Evan turned. "What?"

  "We're good to go, dude."

  "What are you talking about? We're not going anywhere. We've got a multiple fatality incident here, Ron. We stay till we're cleared."

  "Bad idea, Lieutenant. We go while we can. These people will take care of their own, but we'd best be gone by the time word gets out around here."

  "We can't be gone. We've got to report-"

  "Report? To the local cops? And then what? No, man, what we've got to do is get out of here now, while we can, before it gets ugly and personal."

  "Personal with us?"

  "We killed 'em, Lieutenant."

  "We didn't kill 'em, Nolan. You killed 'em."

  "So split a straw. They're not gonna care. We're on the same side, is all that matters. This is a clan culture, so everybody in these poor fuckers' clan is honor bound to kill us. It's going to get personal in about two minutes, I promise."

  Evan looked off down the street at the still-receding line of traffic that had been blocking their way all morning. Behind them, the horns of a hundred other cars urged him to drive off, clear the road, get out of the way. He didn't know how he could in any kind of conscience leave the scene of an incident such as this one-all his police training went against it. There would have to be an investigation, photographs, testimony taken. They couldn't just see an opportunity to get away and run from all this, could they?

  From across the car, Fields said, "I think Mr. Nolan's right, sir. We've got to get out of here. We get back to an FOB someplace." Fields was picking up the jargon. An FOB was a secure troop area, or forward operating base, with Bremer walls, crew-served weapons, and security checkpoints. "We make our report out of there."

  Evan didn't respond and instead went to his radio. "Gene," he said, "what's it look like for getting out of here?"

  "When?"

  "Right now."

  "Decent. There's an off-road to a barricade point another quarter mile up, and I can-"

  At that moment, a low hum filled the torpid air around them. Nolan yelled out, "RPG. Down!" And sixty feet from where Evan stood, the first Humvee suddenly exploded in a ball of flame, knocking him, Fields, and Reese to the pavement. Nearly deafened, Evan still registered that Nolan had come up out of his crouch and turned his machine gun to the building from which he believed the rocket-propelled grenade had been fired.

  Gene Pisoni and Marshawn Whitman had just taken a direct hit that they couldn't have survived. Across the hood of Evan's own Humvee, Reese stood back into his view, the left half of his face awash in blood. He was trying to say something, motioning to Evan, but either he wasn't saying any words or Evan couldn't hear them through the deafening roar in his head. Fields, too, finally got to his fee
t, apparently unharmed, and pointed to the Humvee, then to the empty street yawning open before them, in an unambiguous gesture. It was past time for talking about it. They had to get out of there.

  He was right. Now the second and third Humvees were open targets-possibly saved, Evan later realized, by their proximity to the white sedan or to the crowd that had initially gathered around it. But that wasn't any part of his consideration as he pointed Reese to the second Humvee and hopped into the third one just as a spray of bullets pinged off the street in front of them all, cutting across the hood of his vehicle. Nolan wheeled and fired into the buildings again.

  Onofrio had his vehicle in gear and started forward. In the second Humvee just in front of them, Reese reached the open passenger door and half jumped, half fell inside, joining Levy, Koshi, and Davy Jefferson-a twenty-four-year-old In-N-Out manager from Sunnyvale-who was stationed on the machine gun. And perhaps because of fear, or maybe an understood complicity among the locals, Evan noticed the crowd had suddenly fallen back from around them, isolating them as targets even further. Up out of the roof of the Humvee in front of them, Davy Jefferson had opened fire at some rooflines as well.

  Another spray of bullets kicked at the street between the two vehicles. Over Evan's head, Nolan fired another burst, which was followed closely by a terrifyingly close low humming vibration as another RPG somehow missed them and exploded into a storefront over on their left. Glass and stucco dust rained down over them.

  Evan hit his driver's arm and pointed to the burned-out, still smoking remains of their #1 vehicle. He still could barely hear himself, although he was yelling. "Gene and Marsh! Gene and Marsh!" Telling Onofrio he wasn't going to leave his dead men behind to be mutilated by the mob, which was the way this scenario looked like it was starting to develop.

  They pulled around next to their #2 Humvee and at Evan's signal, he and Fields jumped out into the street again. Evan motioned to Nolan and Jefferson, on the two still-working guns, to cover them as they ran to the destroyed, still smoking #1 Humvee. Whitman's charred and bloodied body had been blown clear out of his hole by the machine gun and now lay sprawled over the roof. Evan and Fields grabbed their fallen comrade by the arms and pulled him down, then began dragging him as fast as they could back to their vehicle.

  For a few seconds, the firing ceased. Evan and Fields managed to load Whitman's body into the back of their car, then they turned and went to join Alan Reese, who had come out of the #2 Humvee and was trying to open the front doors to the first car and get Pisoni out. But the doors were still too hot to touch, as well as sealed shut. The windows, of course, had all been destroyed by the blast as well, so Fields leaned in on the driver's side and tried to get some purchase on Pisoni's lifeless body, but couldn't get it to budge.

  "He's still got his seat belt on!" he called back.

  The force of the grenade had all but knocked the back door on the driver's side off its hinges, and Evan was able to force it further open with a few kicks. They could get Pisoni out that way. Evan got Fields over next to him, put his shoulder to it, and had just started to push when more rounds of automatic weapons fire exploded from the roofs around them. Fields, at his elbow, made a sickening guttural sound, then spun around and collapsed to the ground in a sitting position.

  On the other side of the car, Reese fired off a few useless rounds with his sidearm just as heavy automatic weapons fire began coming from the roofs of buildings on Reese's side of the street as well. Somewhere behind them, Nolan was firing continuously now, back and forth, side to side, from the roof of his vehicle, but when Evan looked over, hoping he might be able to direct some covering fire from the other Humvee, he saw that Davy Jefferson had disappeared and that bullet holes had pocked across the #2 windshield as well. If Levy and Koshi hadn't been hit in their front seats, it was a miracle.

  "Alan!" Evan yelled to Reese. "Get around here on this side!"

  Reese looked at him over the Humvee's hood and nodded. Turning, still firing his sidearm at the rooftops on his side, he made it nearly to the back side of the car before several more automatic rounds straightened him up, threw him up against the car's body, and dropped him out of Evan's sight.

  His own gun drawn, Evan sat next to Fields's crumpled body on the pavement in the partial cover of the Humvee. Up to his left, he could make out a couple of running figures at the edges of the roofline, but Nolan was doing a decent job of keeping them down, stippling the fronts of the buildings they occupied, holding their fire to a minimum. But Nolan was the only machine gunner left and at his firing rate, he would soon be out of ammunition.

  Evan nudged at Fields. "C'mon, buddy, we've got to move." He pushed at Fields's shoulder again and the man's body slumped all the way to the side on the ground, the front of his shirt soaked in red. Another burst of machine-gun fire shattered the air directly behind him, and Evan turned and saw that it was his own #3 Humvee, Nolan on the roof, coming around in the street and running its own screen between the buildings to cover him.

  But he had three men down here at the #1 Humvee, and three more in #2. He could only guess at Reese's condition. Perhaps he'd only been wounded. He'd have to get around the Humvee here to check that out. And then still there were Koshi, Jefferson, and Levy, over in #2. He'd have to order Nolan and Onofrio to help him load the dead and wounded into the backseat and cargo area of the one working Humvee. He couldn't leave his men out here in the street.

  It wasn't possible that he'd lost so many of them in so short a time.

  And then his own Humvee pulled up, the back door open, Onofrio behind the wheel, frantically gesturing that he should jump aboard, screaming at him although Evan could barely hear him. It was his only chance, their only chance.

  But here was Fields right at his side, bleeding to death if not already dead. There was no option but to try to get him in the car first.

  "There's no time!" Nolan yelled down from the roof at Onofrio. "Keep driving! Go! Go! Go!" He fired a short volley up into the rooflines. "Move!"

  It seemed like Nolan was urging-ordering!-Onofrio to save themselves and abandon Evan with the rest of the men. But his driver slowed the vehicle as it came abreast of Evan, looked over in panic and desperation, reached out a hand across the seat.

  Nolan yelled from the roof. "Leave 'em, leave 'em, there's no time! They're gone!"

  The Humvee stopped now, and Onofrio leaned over further and pushed open the passenger door, his hand outstretched. Evan reached around, trying to get ahold of Fields to pull him along. Getting a purchase on his squadmate's sleeve, Evan was halfway to his feet, his own free hand out to Onofrio's, when, deep in his bowels, he felt again the low hum of another incoming RPG.

  It was the last thing he felt for eleven days.

  PART TWO. 2003-2004

  9

  From Ron Nolan's perspective, there was just no benefit to staying in Iraq and talking about it.

  The inquiry into the incident looked like it was going to be a tricky thing. Onofrio was the only witness left in the immediate aftermath, and Nolan believed that his testimony wouldn't be harmful. Onofrio had been busy driving and wouldn't have had a clue about whether the following car was in fact stationary when Nolan had opened fire on it. But the word from the street, the result of Jack Allstrong's reaching out to the local Iraqi and U.S. military cops, had already filtered back about what had actually happened, and there was a reasonable chance that Nolan would be arrested.

  The good news was that the Abu Ghraib scandal had just surfaced, and every American remotely connected to law enforcement in Iraq had been assigned to that investigation. Even Major Charles Tucker, that pain-in-the-ass bean-counter who'd been constantly in their shit about money, found himself reassigned to that scandal.

  But in spite of that, and though he knew that jurisdictional issues were problematic at best in Iraq, especially when they involved contractors accused of criminal activity such as, in this case, murder, Nolan was unwilling to risk his own arrest. You never kne
w what could happen then. The CPA might decide to use him as an example for other trigger-happy contractors, or give him to the Iraqi prosecutors, both nonstarters from Nolan's point of view.

  In fact, Nolan didn't feel particularly bad about what he'd actually done-hey, you're in a war, shit happens. The dumbasses should've stopped sooner, or better yet, stayed off the street entirely. What the hell were they thinking? If he had it to do over again, he'd do the very same thing, rules of engagement or no. And although he did very much regret the loss of life among his own convoy, again this was just another turd in the gigantic shitpile that was this war. Who could have predicted such a massive local retaliation for such a small, localized event? And then again, how was he supposed to know that this particular Mohammed Raghead, the father who'd stupidly driven his whole family into the killing radius of Nolan's Humvee, was in fact Jahlil al-Palawi, a major tribal leader and the most influential Shiite in the Masbah neighborhood?

  Anyway, clearly the intelligent thing to do was for Nolan to blow Dodge until this incident blended into the chaos of all the other ones that were happening somewhere in the country just about every day. In a few months, Nolan could always come back with Allstrong or with another security outfit and pick up where he'd left off. In the meanwhile, Jack Allstrong certainly didn't want an army of investigators coming into BIAP without his say-so. Who knows what they'd see that they didn't like, and report back to the CPA?

  So within a week of the incident, Nolan was back in Redwood City. After negotiations with Jack Allstrong that consisted of a couple of glasses of Glenfiddich each, the company chose to construe his departure as caused by an act of God, which meant it would honor his contract for a six-month hitch at full pay. And with some of this apparently inexhaustible supply of money, Nolan put a down payment on a modern and elegant furnished townhouse near the sylvan border between Redwood City and Woodside. Still employed by Allstrong, he was the company's chief Bay Area recruiter of ex-military personnel. He knew the kind of people Jack Allstrong needed over in Iraq and he generally knew where to find them.