by AJ Stewart
Chapter Twelve
The following day was like every other morning. The air built from hot to hotter. It was the kind of air you could eat, full of dust and spices. Babar wandered into the Al Jumhuriyah market. He was dressed in a white cotton shirt from Egypt and black trousers from Pakistan. His heavy features gave him a universal look. He had effectively played Algerian, Egyptian, Libyan, French and Afghani. Now he was Iraqi. He sampled dates at a fruit stand and then bought a bag of oranges. He wandered around for a half hour before he found himself by a coffee stand. He took a seat by the street that offered a good view back to the counter. Ordered coffee and a small plate of dates. He put his packet of cigarettes on the table but chose not to light one up. The stand was open to the market and covered only by a canvas awning, but it felt like an oasis from the hubbub of the marketplace. Around him humanity pulsed without cessation. Babar sipped his coffee and closed his eyes and let the thick dark liquid course through him. The dates were sweet like candy and offset the bitterness of the coffee.
Dennison entered the coffee stand at 1:50 p.m. and took a table one away from Babar. Dropped a small canvas pack at his feet. Like Babar, he faced the counter, and ordered coffee but nothing to eat. He looked around the space, taking it in. His coffee arrived and he nodded to the server but he didn’t drink any. He tapped the table softly as Babar looked him over.
“Green t-shirt,” Babar said to himself. “Camo trousers.”
The second man walked in fifteen minutes later. Dennison had not touched his coffee. The second man looked like Babar. He could have been from anywhere east of Portugal or west of Kabul. He wore a heavy growth on his face. Longer than stubble but shorter than a beard. His mustache was black and heavy and matched his hair which was thick and combed back and going silver at the temples. The man ordered a coffee without a smile. His face was creased and hard, as if it wore a great burden. Babar reached for his cigarettes and tapped the package, but changed his mind and waved to the server for another coffee.
Hutton sat in the back of the Highlander with Fontaine. They waited at the northeast end of the market. Thorn, Gorecki and Manu were parked on the western side, a block away from where they had watched Dennison park his vehicle. They all listened to Babar as he wandered through the market. The sounds of the trade came in clear.
“Babar,” said Hutton. “It’s an interesting name.”
Fontaine glanced at her.
“I remember a cartoon elephant from when I was a child. He was called Babar.”
Fontaine kept looking at her. “I wouldn’t mention that. If I were you, that is,” he said.
Hutton nodded and looked at the window and waited. She turned back when she heard Babar’s voice again through the speakers of the laptop that Fontaine had on his lap.
“Green t-shirt. Camo trousers.”
“Dennison’s in place,” said Gorecki.
Hutton looked at her watch. 1:50 p.m. “He’s early.”
“He’d want to be there when his contact arrives.”
“How did you know?”
Fontaine kept his eye on the laptop screen. “Creature of habit. He’s away from his turf. He came yesterday to scope it out. Not just the location but the time of day. The roads, the crowds. The way in and the way out. He’s very cautious but also very predictable.”
Hutton nodded and sat back so she could see the screen. There was a window open on the screen. A black box. They watched and waited. About fifteen minutes later the black box flickered like an old television and an image appeared. It was a mid-shot. The bottom of the shot was brown and out of focus. It was a table. It took up about a third of the image. Above it there were men sitting at a table. A man facing away dressed in a green t-shirt and camouflage trousers. The man opposite looked Iraqi.
“That’s the contact?” Hutton asked.
Fontaine nodded. “That’s him.”
“Send me a still.”
Fontaine tapped a couple of buttons on the laptop and took a shot of the image on screen. He connected it to a chat window and sent it. Hutton had flipped open her own laptop and received the image with a ping, like a microwave oven that had run its cycle. She opened the image, used her fingers on the trackpad to draw a dotted square around the man’s face, and cut out the face image and pasted it to another application.
“If he’s on our hit list, we’ll know pretty fast,” she said, tapping a button. The image was dumped into a face recognition system that US federal authorities used to track terrorists. She left the system to search the database back in Virginia and turned her attention to Fontaine’s screen, and the video coming from the camera hidden in the cigarette packet on Babar’s table.
“Any problems getting across?” asked Dennison.
“No,” said the man. He sipped his coffee and wiped the corner of his mouth with his finger.
“So where is it?”
“Al Maqal port, as agreed. You should have been there. You should not be wasting time here.”
“I like markets. How will I find it?” asked Dennison.
The man frowned at Dennison like he thought he was the lowest form of life he’d ever met.
“You look,” he snarled.
Dennison didn’t flinch. “Is it safe?”
“No. It is being watched,” the man said, condescendingly. “But it would be better if we had met there.”
“Well, I like markets.”
“Al Maqal?” asked Fontaine.
“It’s a small port, here in Basra,” said Gorecki. “Not deep water, so they don’t do oil.”
“You guys need to get there,” said Fontaine.
“We are already moving, mon Adjudant,” said Gorecki.
Thorn was driving and he was moving around the market. He accelerated up the street and then hit the brakes. The SUV had antilock brakes so it didn’t skid, but it stopped fast and Gorecki nearly head-butted the windshield. Manu pushed the rear door open and dropped to the dirt between their SUV and the vehicle parked on the side of the street. The one Staff Sergeant Dennison had borrowed from the motor pool. Manu pulled out a KA-BAR knife. It was long and black and sharp enough to perform surgery. Manu had traded it with a US marine in Afghanistan. He wrapped one hand backward around the handle and pressed the other against the buttcap so the knife was facing sideways and away from him, and he drove it hard into the tire of Dennison’s SUV. The rubber was thick and strong but the knife was sharp. The blade slipped in and Manu yanked it sideways to create a six-inch gash. The tire wheezed and punched air out on the street. Manu was back in his seat and Thorn was hard on the accelerator before the rim sank to the pavement. Thorn leaned on the steering and tore around the block and raced away toward the river.
Dennison didn’t like any of it. He didn’t like being ordered to leave his turf in Baghdad. Especially now, as things were ramping down and opportunity was ramping up and within months the whole thing would be done. But he was dealing with savages. They were everywhere. Some of them wore uniforms like his. Some of them wore expensive suits and silk ties. Many of them wore no uniform and had no allegiance to anything. And some looked like this monster in front of him. He didn’t know the guy, didn’t care. He was a savage. He wore a look of contempt as if Dennison were the savage. As if he bought into the malarkey about this place being the cradle of mankind. This was a hot, barren hellhole of a place, populated by savages who had been fighting over these pointless tracts of land for millennia. Dennison wanted to wash his hands of all of them. And he would. He swallowed the bile in his throat and felt it burn. Soon he would be done with them. He would have the payday of a lifetime, and then he’d pull out with all the others and leave the savages to their miserable land and their wars.
“What sort of a truck?” Dennison asked.
“Navistar,” said the dark man in his thick accent. The words seemed to get gobbled up in his mustache. “Iraqi plates. Number is one-eight-one, four-six. You can remember that?”
“Yes, I can remember that.”
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br /> The dark man leaned back and glanced past the American as he sipped the last of his coffee. There was another man sitting alone across from them. He had a packet of cigarettes sitting on his table. He hadn’t smoked a single one. The dark man didn’t understand that. What went better with coffee than a cigarette? He looked at the man and their eyes connected for a moment. Then the dark man turned his attention to the American at his table. He didn’t care about the American. He was some kind of delivery boy. Certainly, it was true that the man himself had driven the truck this far. That wasn’t because he was also a delivery boy. That was because it was a mission of importance. A cargo that had to be delivered. He had volunteered to drive it himself. Fourteen uncomfortable hours. Now it was done. Now he would pray and would return in the back of a sedan with someone else at the wheel, back to safety in time for coffee and late supper. But first, what he wanted was a cigarette.
The man stood and ran his hands through the silver hair at his temples. Then he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and placed them on the table. Two keys on an unadorned silver ring of steel. He then dropped a piece of paper on the table. It had the look of a bill of lading.
“Show that to the guardhouse. One man will know what it is for. You should not waste time.”
He gave the American a final glance and stepped toward the big guy sitting a table away.
Fontaine watched the man get up and step toward Babar’s table. He stopped so his belt was the only thing visible on the screen above the out-of-focus tabletop. Fontaine heard the man speak Arabic. Fontaine looked at Yusuf, sitting half turned in the front seat of the SUV.
“He is asking for a cigarette,” translated Yusuf.
Fontaine held his breath.
Babar let out a breath. The man stood above him. He looked a touch scruffy, as if he hadn’t slept in a few days, but beyond that he looked like he kept in shape. Like he ate well but ate healthily. And he looked intelligent. His eyes gripped Babar and didn’t let him go.
“Of course,” said Babar replied in Arabic. He picked up the cigarettes. The packet was wrapped at both ends in foil. At one end the foil was pulled back a little at the corner. Babar tilted the packet and tapped it against his hand. A couple of cigarettes stuck their ends out. Babar lifted the packet to the man. He took one between his forefinger and his thumb. Like pincers.
“Baaraka Allahu fik,” said the man.
Babar fished a lighter from his pocket and lit the man’s cigarette. The man nodded his thanks again. Babar saw no thanks in his eyes. The man turned and walked out of the coffee stand, and headed north away from the market.
“So?” asked Hutton.
“He said God bless you,” said Fontaine. “It means thank you.” He looked at Yusuf who nodded confirmation.
Fontaine breathed. “Okay, Babar. We’ve got the second guy. You stay on Dennison.”
“Oui,” said Babar.
Fontaine and Hutton got out and cut east through an alley. They reached the street the man had walked up and waited.
“You start, while it’s busy,” said Fontaine. “He won’t figure to be followed by a woman. If it thins out too much, I’ll cut in.”
Hutton nodded and stepped to the corner. She saw the face of the man from the video. He was taller and thinner than he had looked on the laptop. He held himself erect, upright posture, as if he considered himself important. He marched past the alley and Hutton checked her hijab and stepped out onto the street. She followed her target for a block. Then the man crossed a busy paved road, cutting through traffic. Hutton made to follow but stopped. She couldn’t dash through traffic without attracting attention. She stood on the curb, muscles twitching, until the light changed and she hurried across.
Once on the other side she looked to where the man had walked but couldn’t find him. She moved along the cross street into a sea of men. There were always more men on the street than women but now it seemed all the women had evaporated. She spun around. Dark-haired, dark-skinned men surrounded her. She glanced up and saw the blue dome on top of the building in front of her. More men coming and going. Then she caught a flash of light. A flash of silver at the temples. She looked again.
“Hutton?” she heard Fontaine through her earpiece.
“Too many men,” she said. “Where are you?”
“On the other side of the cross street. Coming up behind you.”
Hutton’s eyes darted from side to side, sweeping the crowd for the flash of silver. She felt the eyes on her, the men around her staring at this woman standing where she didn’t belong. She focused.
Fontaine reached her side. “Where?”
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t have lost him. Not in two blocks. She scanned back and forth.
“There,” she said, holding herself from pointing.
“Where?”
Hutton glanced at Fontaine.
“He’s gone into a mosque.”
Fontaine looked toward the entrance to the mosque. It wasn’t large, like some of the postcard mosques in Iraq. It was an everyday place of worship. Men were moving toward the door.
“It’s time for prayer,” he said. “We can’t go in there.”
“We’ll both stick out,” said Hutton.
Then they heard the crackle of the radio.
“Mon adjudant, Babar. Dennison found his car.”
“Is he fixing it?”
“Non. He left it. He just jumped in a taxi.”
Fontaine and Hutton looked at each other.
“He’s headed for the truck,” she said.
Fontaine pressed his receiver into his ear.
“Thorn? You guys on air?”
A burst of static, then: “Mon adjudant? It’s Gorecki. We have a problem.”
Chapter Thirteen
The port was a riot. Literally. A large group of men—maybe two hundred by Gorecki’s estimation—had gathered at the gate. Al Maqal wasn’t a large port by any kind of standard. It sat on the bank of the river known as Shatt al-Arab, or stream of the Arabs. Although the port was only 135 kilometers upstream from the Persian Gulf it wasn’t a deep water port. All of the oil exported from the Basra oilfields was handled by the Al Başrah and Khor al-Amaya oil-loading terminals that sat around 50 kilometers out into the Persian Gulf. What Al Maqal handled more than anything else was food.
Thorn pulled the SUV over just short of the port. The mob was chanting but there seemed to be mixed messages and no one slogan was audible. It wasn’t an organized protest. It was the sort of hungry mob that the three men had seen many times before. They had secured aircraft-loads of food in the Sudan and trucks loads of food in Afghanistan before. They knew the look.
Thorn, Manu and Gorecki grabbed their daypacks and checked their sidearms and moved to the port entrance on foot. There was a patrol of US soldiers standing back from the melee. Gorecki approached one of them. He was a young guy, probably not even old enough to drink in his home state. He was alert and watched Gorecki approach with the confidence of a man with a Colt M4 Carbine rifle in his hands. Gorecki nodded as he approached and held his hands casually away from his sidearm. He was dressed like a military contractor. The soldier would have seen thousands of men dressed just the same. Nothing unusual.
“What’s the problem?” Gorecki asked.
“The usual,” replied the soldier.
“Food?”
The American soldier nodded. “Shipment of wheat. Been there for a week. Word gets around.”
“Why don’t they unload it?”
The soldier shrugged. “Someone didn’t pay the man, you know what I mean?”
Gorecki nodded. He knew. Someone higher up the chain hadn’t received their cut, and they were happy to let the shipment rot on the dock until they did. To let it out would set the wrong example.
“I thought the oil money was flowing again?” asked Gorecki.
“It’s flowing all right, but it ain’t flowing down here.”
Gorecki nodded. “We got a shipment in there.�
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“Good luck with that.”
“Any reason we can’t just go in?”
The soldier shrugged again. “No skin off my nose, but they might not agree,” he said, nodding toward the mob.
“You guys not getting involved?”
“Not unless someone starts shooting.”
Gorecki nodded to the soldier and received the same gesture in return. Gorecki wandered back to Thorn and Manu.
“Good news, bad news,” Gorecki said. “Bad news, the Americans aren’t going to do anything. So we have to go through that to get in.” He nodded at the chanting men. “Good news, the Americans aren’t going to do anything. So Dennison isn’t going to get much help getting in, either.”
Thorn and Manu nodded and looked at the mob. They were noisy but not volatile. The men had seen that before, too. Crowds gathered momentum. At first, they would be voicing their displeasure. At some point it would occur to them that the food was not coming out. Then the anger would grow, fired by thoughts of hungry wives and children. That could happen days from now. Or minutes.
“I have an idea,” said Manu.
The three men marched past the American soldiers to the fence surrounding the port. It was hurricane wire and offered no real security. They walked along the fence toward the gatehouse. The closer they got the more men they had to walk through. They edged their way through as if they had every right to be there. The looks they got were a mix of anger and deference. Like any kind of uniform was something to be wary of, not to be messed with.
Manu led the way through, his large frame acting like a bulldozer. He buffeted his way to the gatehouse. It sat to the side of a large hurricane wire gate that was chained shut. Manu knocked on the window of the gatehouse. Inside three men watched him with uncertainty. They were armed with pistols but looked uneasy about using them if things got out of hand. Manu tapped on the window again. His large round face offered an easy smile. It said, hey, we’re here to help.