Team Red

by David DeBatto

  “Anyway,” Reicken said, “I thought you should have a heads-up. It’s up to you if you want to go out or ride a desk for a few days until we find out who’s doing this.”

  DeLuca decided not to react to the insult. As MacKenzie had told him before, “You’re older than him, you’re smarter than him, you’re better looking and you’re six inches taller than he is—he’s totally jealous of you, and if you let him get to you, he pulls you down to his level.” She was right, at least the part about not letting Reicken get to him.

  “No thanks, but I’d appreciate it, Colonel, if we could keep this between ourselves for as long as possible. I wouldn’t want to worry anybody on the team.”

  Two hours later, DeLuca was riding in an up-armored Humvee next to a man who apparently hadn’t showered since the first Gulf War. They were fifteen klicks from base, headed for a compound on the outskirts of the town of Ad-Dujayl. The raiding party, operating out of the Balad Army Air Field, popularly known as Camp Anaconda, fifty kilometers north of Baghdad, consisted of three Bradley fighting vehicles and seven Humvees. Each Humvee carried five MPs, two in the front and two in the back, armed with M-16s and 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistols, and a Squad Automatic Weapon or SAW gunner protruding from a hole in the roof, seated in a canvas sling between the rear passengers with only his upper torso exposed, manning a roof-mounted M-60 machine gun. DeLuca reached across his flak jacket to check his revolver, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it. He wasn’t one of the gunslingers. Counterintelligence didn’t do security. That’s what the MPs and the Bradleys were for.

  “Eyes on,” he radioed to MacKenzie in the lead Humvee.

  “Gotcha,” she chirped back. “Too bad Doc and Dan have to miss the party,” she added, referring to the two other members of DeLuca’s team, currently interviewing the mayor of Balad to see if he could explain why they’d found two hundred mortar rounds in the basement of the police station. It was called a THT, or Tactical Human-Intelligence Team, though sometimes he thought Strategic Human Intelligence Team might have made for a more apt acronym. He didn’t like it when the team was split. They’d been working well together for months, and had started to anticipate each other’s thoughts and needs. He’d said it a million times, beginning when he’d been the top instructor at Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca: “Counterintelligence is a state of mind.” Splitting the team disturbed the collective state of mind.

  DeLuca thought about the wanted poster. Maybe he could turn it into a positive—having a little celebrity status might help, the next time he was negotiating with a sheikh or tribal leader. MacKenzie had told him he was better looking than Reicken. Was that a flirt? Colleen was attractive, no question, but she was also twenty years his junior, and half the time, he pissed her off. Doc was probably right. “Dave,” he’d said, “if you knew half as much about women as you know about counterintelligence, your marriage wouldn’t be in the trouble it’s in.”

  “Is bad road,” interrupted the man with a thick Arab accent sitting next to DeLuca. The man’s name was Adnan, and he’d been with the battalion since they’d left Kuwait, an Iraqi exile and former Intelligence Service liaison with the Republican Guard who’d surrendered during the first Gulf War, after Saddam Hussein’s regime had killed his wife and family. He’d worked for the past ten years as a houseboy for a wealthy Kuwaiti family, but he’d jumped at a chance to go back as an informant. Adnan was filled with hatred for the regime, that was clear, but that didn’t mean DeLuca trusted him.

  “What?” DeLuca could hardly hear Adnan over the din of the Humvee’s engine and the rocks and gravel pounding beneath the vehicle.

  “Bad road,” Adnan shouted again. “The people who live here are all thieves, I think.”

  DeLuca checked his weapons again. He was armed with a regulation 9mm fifteen-round Beretta model 92S, which he carried in a “Mr. Mike” leg rig, but just in case, he also carried, in a shoulder holster, the same six-inch stainless-steel Smith and Wesson model 66 revolver, loaded with .357 magnum full-jacketed hollow points, that he’d carried during his twenty years on the Boston police force. He carried the revolver because he knew it worked, and because he had a relationship with the piece, a feeling something like, “We’ve done this before, and we can do it again.”

  “They’re all bad roads,” he told Adnan.

  The countryside was actually rather lovely, the road lined with date palms and vineyards, and irrigation canals with their water pumps sounding a steady chik-chik-chik. Every house they passed made him nervous, because you never knew who was peeking from the windows, or what sort of arms they might be aiming at you.

  “I am ready to die,” Adnan said, more or less out of the blue.

  “Oh yeah?” DeLuca said.

  Adnan nodded.

  “Well I’m not,” DeLuca told him. “I’m still paying off a dining-room set we got at Filene’s.”

  DeLuca saw women harvesting crops under the hot sun, cultivating with hoes, swinging sickles, even wielding shovels to dig trenches while covered head to toe in full burquas, with only the faces of girls under twelve showing. He saw young boys in shorts or dishdashas herding goats or sheep. Everybody had ugly feet. It was a nation of people with ugly feet.

  “Commence waving and smiling, everybody,” he said into the radio. “Sunglasses off if you’re looking at anybody. Pearly whites, front and center. Hug hug hug . . .”

  Two of the younger boys working in the field waved back at him. It was silly to a lot of people, to Doc and to Dan in particular, but DeLuca firmly believed in presenting a friendly face to the people whose hearts and minds it was their task to win over. Getting tough only created more enemies, and as his mother used to say, “You catch more flies with sugar . . .”

  “I think you should ask the CIA for a raise,” Adnan said. DeLuca operated “sterile” on CI missions, in a uniform devoid of any insignia that might indicate name, rank, or even branch of service. Most of the people he met, including American officers, assumed he worked for the CIA, calling him only “Mr. David.” It was a common misconception that invariably worked in his favor.

  “Maybe if we find Saddam’s fortune, we can split it,” DeLuca said in jest.

  “I would spit on Saddam’s money,” Adnan said.

  “So would I,” DeLuca said. “Then I’d wipe it off and spend it.”

  He checked his weapon again. On his very first raid, DeLuca had compulsively double-checked his automatic to make sure he’d chambered a round, imagining fedayeen gunmen with RPGs popping up from behind the stone walls and palm trees like the bad guys in the Desert Storm video games his son played during his sullen teenager period. He was slightly more used to it now.

  “Hey Joan-Claude,” he radioed to VanDamm, using his nickname for her. “Ask Khalil there how much farther.” Khalil was a Kurd, younger than Adnan by ten years and smaller, thin and wiry where Adnan was more solidly built. Khalil was from Sulaymaniyah, on the Iranian border, and a bit of an entrepreneur who’d worked for his uncles smuggling cigarettes and alcohol into Iran as a teenager, leading pack trains through the Zagros mountains, but he’d come south after Operation Iraqi Freedom made it safe for him to do so, looking for opportunities. Khalil supposedly knew the area and had been to Ad-Dujayl before. DeLuca looked ahead, where Mack (“Miss Colleen”) and his translator, Sergeant Linda VanDamm, rode in the lead Humvee.

  “You should have thought of that before we left,” she radioed back. “I’ll ask him.” She’d served in Frankfurt at the same time DeLuca had, though he hadn’t known her there. She was in many ways a seasoned professional, yet she hadn’t brushed up on her Arabic since graduating from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. She was married with three kids and should have been home making sandwiches, not pounding down a dirt road between Iraq and a hard place, DeLuca thought.

  “He’s not sure,” she finally said.

  “He’s not sure how much farther it is?”

  “That’s what he just said,” she
replied.

  “Ausgezeichnett,” DeLuca said. “Sagt wir sind nicht verloren.”

  “Wir sind nicht verloren,” VanDamm radioed back, matching his pidgin German. “Nür ein bischen upgefucked. Look at it this way—we don’t know where we are, but at least we’re making good time.”

  It was too hot to laugh, nearly 115 degrees in the shade, with a wet-ball of 96 on a 1-100 scale, according to the weather station set up opposite the circle of tents they called home. Everybody had to carry extra water if the wet-ball was above 85. One of the MPs, an undersized kid with a bad complexion, had already taken a bag of glucose just to get himself started. DeLuca had worked as a cop in Yuma, Arizona, after getting out of the service the first time, and thought he knew heat. He didn’t. He was dark enough that he didn’t sunburn easily, but Colleen, with her fair Scotch-Irish complexion, had to slather on sun block four or five times a day, which made her smell surfer-girlish and reminded DeLuca of all the hotties he’d lusted for as a kid at Jones Beach during summer breaks. The flak vest DeLuca wore only made it worse, adding another fifteen to twenty degrees.

  He wiped the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve and opened the Velcro strips on the front of his vest to let the marginally cooler air blow across his drenched DCU blouse. It was standard operating procedure to keep your flak jacket closed on missions, but nobody did. It was also SOP that everybody was supposed to wear their seat belts, but nobody did that either, the common wisdom being that if your vehicle were to come under attack, the faster you could get out of it, the better.

  They turned off the main highway and vectored south on a dirt road that paralleled an irrigation canal that drained the Tigris. DeLuca studied his map, trying to figure out where they were. He was tempted to use the sat phone to call his son at IMINT and ask him where they were. Lieutenant Scott DeLuca led a team monitoring imagery collected by one of the many surveillance satellites the Defense Department had quietly placed in orbit above the Middle East after the first Gulf War, and could give DeLuca a precise fix if he wanted one, but DeLuca didn’t want to abuse the privilege.

  “You look a bit like Tony Orlando,” DeLuca told Adnan. “Anybody ever tell you that? You remember Tony Orlando and Dawn? Tie a yellow ribbon . . . No? You ever been to Branson, Missouri?”

  “No,” Adnan said, shaking his head apologetically.

  “You’d love Branson,” DeLuca said. He’d taken a vacation there with his wife and hated every minute of it, a fake smile plastered to his face the entire time. “Tony Orlando has his own theater there. People would treat you like a big shot, but you’d have to wear a tuxedo.”

  They’d dressed Adnan, for his own protection, in an American uniform complete with a camouflaged Kevlar helmet and full battle-rattle and American sunglasses, cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs. DeLuca felt sorry for him, considering what he’d been through. He couldn’t imagine losing your wife and child. Adnan had been brought along today because he’d spied for the Iraqi Intelligence Service or “Mukhaberat” back when he’d been a member of the Republican Guard, reporting on any officers showing any disloyalty to the regime. Today they were looking for a man named Omar Hadid, a high-ranking Ba’ath party member and former Mukhaberat official. Hadid was also a sheikh, the tribal leader in Ad-Dujayl and the grandson of the great sheikh Husseini Hadid. DeLuca did not want Omar as much as he wanted the information he could provide. DeLuca’s team’s mission, for the month since he’d left Kuwait, had been to dismantle what remained of the Mukhaberat—find them (or anybody else on the army’s blacklist he happened to come across), arrest them, and start them on their way to Abu Ghraib or Gitmo as captured enemy combatants or, if appropriate, offer them leniency in return for more useful information. He’d popped forty-one former blacklist members so far, including eight faces from the fifty-five on the famous “Deck of Cards.” In the opinion of CENTCOM, putting away the Mukhaberat leadership was as crucial to rebuilding Iraq as finding Saddam had been, because of the reputation the agency had earned during Saddam’s rule. The head of the Mukhaberat, Izzat Mohammed Al-Tariq, had been killed in the opening days of the war, his compound near the center of Baghdad reduced to a sunken pile of rubble when a half-dozen JDAMs and cruise missiles slammed into it. “The Butcher of Kuwait” was responsible for half the bodies that were still being found in the mass graves surrounding Baghdad. He’d given the order to gas the Kurds during the Anfal campaign in 1988 that killed over one hundred thousand people when Saddam wanted revenge against the Kurds who’d sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Al-Tariq had personally ordered the torture of thousands of individuals, particularly during and after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, such that the government of Kuwait had put a bounty on his head, one-365th of Kuwait’s gross national product, or about $30 million, to the man who assassinated him. His preferred method of torture, according to reports, was to disembowel his victims in front of their families. Another story, unconfirmed, said Al-Tariq had kept thousands of his victims’ body parts preserved in formaldehyde jars in a private collection, and that he’d often gotten his victims to reveal what they knew simply by walking them through it. Some of the things Al-Tariq had done were said to have sickened Saddam himself—he was the psychopath Saddam kept on a chain to intimidate the other madmen under his command. Adnan had been one of Al-Tariq’s bodyguards, but only for a month.

  Even with Al-Tariq gone, DeLuca’s mission remained important because the Mukhaberat had been the only agency Saddam had trusted to hide his weapons of mass destruction. The men who’d worked for Al-Tariq would know where Saddam’s WMD—if he had any—had gone.

  DeLuca was taking a drink from a bottle of water—“From the Cool Springs of Saudi Arabia,” the label said—when suddenly the convoy stopped.

  After a few seconds, he got on his radio.

  This was no place for something to be wrong.

  “What’s up, Mack?” he asked. “Why are we stopped?”

  “We’re here, I think,” Mack said. He heard VanDamm’s Arabic in the background.

  “What do you mean, ‘We’re here’? We’re where?”

  “That’s the house,” Mack radioed back. “Right in front of us.”

  It took him a split second to realize what had happened. Standard procedure was to stop well away from a target to study the “falcon view” first, a composite photograph of the latest satellite imagery, enlarged so that each squad leader had a picture. The next step was to reconnoiter from at least half a kilometer away with binoculars, then form a 360-degree cordon with an armored vehicle on each side, and then move in. What you didn’t want to do, if you could help it, was drive right up to a house full of trouble in broad daylight and stop. There’d evidently been a communication failure.

  “Out of the vehicles, everybody!” he commanded.

  He pushed Adnan out the door and bailed out his own side, scrambling twenty yards to the wall surrounding the compound. He looked back toward the vehicles. Nobody was moving.

  “Get the fuck out and take cover!” he shouted again. “Now!”

  Mack and VanDamm exited the lead vehicle, dragging Khalil with them. Mack was quick and light on her feet. VanDamm wasn’t. The MPs were slow to react, their progress hastened when somebody on the top floor of the house suddenly opened fire on them from a window with what appeared to be a Kalashnikov.

  As he ducked, DeLuca heard a burst of shots ring out and felt pieces of splintered wall rain down on him.

  The SAW gunner on the second Humvee swung his M-60 around and opened up on the house, shattering brick and mortar, sending up a shower of stucco and ceramic roof tiles, soon joined by the gunner on the third vehicle, both men firing so rapidly that there was not the staccato stutter familiarly associated with WWII-era machine guns, just a steady horrific roar, until DeLuca could see daylight coming through a hole in the top right corner of the building where the gunman had been.

  DeLuca took the opportunity to run to where the MP noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC), a first sergeant na
med Carter, had taken cover.

  “Sergeant Carter—who’s got the back of the house?” DeLuca asked.

  “No one,” Carter said, as if the idea of surrounding a house you were trying to capture was something that hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Where are the Bradleys?” DeLuca asked.

  Again, the MP didn’t know. DeLuca turned and saw them, holding position a quarter klick up the road.

  Somebody had to do something.

  “As of now, I’m in charge of this mission,” DeLuca said. “Do you understand?”

  Carter nodded.

  DeLuca pointed to Mack and to VanDamm, used two fingers to point to his own eyes, then pointed to the Hummers, finally gesturing with his Beretta to tell them they were to stay with the vehicles. “Keep our friends with you,” he added into his team radio, one of six walkie-talkies he’d purchased out of pocket at Radio Shack at $150 a pair before leaving Massachusetts, knowing how the army tended to underequip the National Guard.

  VanDamm held up her walkie-talkie to indicate it wasn’t working, which made no sense since he’d put fresh batteries in before leaving Balad. He scrambled over to where they were crouched with the two informants. The SAW gunner opened up on the house again as he ran, though no further shots came from the residence.

  “I’m sorry,” VanDamm shouted when DeLuca reached her. She looked terrified on this, her first mission away from post, but she was holding it together. “It got turned off somehow. It’s working now.” Mack looked frightened but was trying hard not to show it, her dark eyes darting behind her goggles as she bit her lip, her nostrils flared. “Do you need me inside?” Linda VanDamm asked.

  “I’ll take Ciccarelli,” DeLuca said, referring to the young specialist fresh out of DLI whom they’d picked up for the trip. “I need you and Mack to stay here and make sure our boys don’t get scratched up.” Adnan did not seem frightened. Perhaps he truly was prepared to die. DeLuca turned to Khalil. “You’re sure this is the house? One hundred percent positive?”