by David Abrams
Duret looked at the EOD team again. “All right, gentlemen. Let’s get another water charge out there. Just to be on the safe side.”
“Roger, sir,” the sergeant said and finished securing the cylinder in Robby’s arms. He nodded at the joystick-sergeant and the robot rolled forward for a second time, moving toward the Opel with a growing reluctance. The robot, like the humans behind him, was tired of this day-in, day-out bullshit. He had nerves of steel, yes, but it was tedious to be carted from one Baghdad street to the other, morning, noon, and night, always expected to go where humans refused, always the same old cautious approach, warily eyeing the suspicious package, the odd swell of fresh concrete, the dog carcass with wires protruding from each nostril, while the humans sat safe and secure behind their armor-skin Humvees, watching his progress via a computer screen. One of these days, he’d show them, he’d just up and—
The robot quit. Stopped dead in its tracks forty feet shy of the Opel.
The sergeant on the joystick jiggled it up, back, right, left. Nothing. He checked his computer screen and tapped several keys. Still no response. He swore, then looked at the other sergeant and shook his head. “Battery.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“Wish I was.”
“Godfuckingdammit.”
“Plan B?”
“Of course, Plan Fucking B.” The EOD sergeant would have to examine the car himself to see the extent of damage done to the homemade bomb. If he was honest with himself, he’d seen the inevitability of suiting up from the minute he arrived on the scene. Robby was all well and good but in situations like this where they faced uncertain payloads there really was no substitute for nonmechanical eyes-on. With the crowd of locals growing, simmering, and pressing ever closer to the cordon, and with CNN beaming a live signal to the mothers and fathers of America—quite possibly his own mother and father who were clutching themselves as they gaped at the TV screen back in Portland, Oregon—he had no choice but to go and defuse the situation now that his robot had stopped dead in its tracks.
The sergeant began stepping into his eighty-pound Kevlar-lined suit, zipping and cinching. Before he put on the hood, he said, “I swear, that robot is gonna be the death of me,” words he wished he could immediately pull back into his mouth. He wasn’t particularly superstitious by nature, but that was like something out of the movies.
Encased in the suit, he started moving toward the white car slowly, as if he were wading through a river of cold molasses. Inside, he had his own personal sauna, raising the morning’s 110 degrees another fifteen notches on the thermometer, slow-cooking himself to death within the protective Kevlar coating. Not that the suit would do any good if the Opel suddenly went off. He would never survive the blast of the propane-propelled artillery shells. As he liked to say, the suit just gave them something to bury him in, something to keep the body parts all in one place.
The rest of the soldiers watched the EOD sergeant walk forward, stiff as a zombie. He reached the car in slow motion and leaned forward through the window. The sergeant looked like he was kissing his wife good-bye before she drove off on a school field trip with their fourth-grade son who was bouncing in his seat and making grrring sounds for a toy dinosaur he held in his hands, the sergeant pecking his wife on the cheek, both of them laughing at how giddy their kid was to go to a museum and see a bunch of skeletons at the Flesh Eaters of the Past exhibit. Inside the Kevlar, he started to smile and drift back to the United States.
But then his eyes widened behind the breath-fogged helmet and he was windmilling away from the Opel, stumbling in panicked retreat. What he’d seen in the backseat meant the end of his world as he knew it. This was it, all aboard for Kaputsville.
A soldier on the perimeter shouted, “Watch out! Watch out!” even though he had no clue what they were supposed to watch out for—he was just reacting to the EOD guy’s sudden panic. It seemed like a good idea at the time to start shouting, “Watch out!”
The warning rippled down the line and everyone got into battle-ready position.
That’s when this movie went slow motion for Vic Duret. Later, he’d tell his executive officer his brain zoomed out for a wide-angle perspective of the scene and he could see:
• Intersection Quillpen and the three tanks askew in the road, the last of them with a white car up its ass like a half-squeezed turd
• the half-moon of shopkeepers, goatherds, and schoolchildren gathered around the accident site, pressing against the hastily erected cordon and raising a chorus of ululations, tongues flapping at the back of their throats
• the ring of Humvees facing the tanks across an empty expanse of street, a squad of soldiers keeping their M4s trained on the crowd and the Opel, alert for any funny business
• the robot frozen in the center of the tableau, a water charge cradled uselessly in its arms
• an empty plastic water bottle rolling between the robot’s legs, skipped along by the wind and moving toward the Opel while at the same time a figure stuffed inside a heavy fire suit tap-danced back as quickly as his cement-weight boots would allow
• a man—thought to be dead on three separate occasions —now incredibly, like a movie monster who refused to stay down, stirring once again in the front seat of the white car, pushing himself off the steering wheel with great effort—a sticky string of blood cobwebbing him to the dashboard—and turning himself toward the passenger side of the car, fumbling, reaching for something that might be the Koran or might be the hand grenade
• Captain Shrinkle giving himself completely to the dread and terror of close-order combat and releasing the clench on his bowels
• Duret himself standing tall but paralyzed with indecision, clarity of action unable to cut through the fog of headache
• a bullet cutting the day, splitting the air, hurtling from the barrel of an M4 and lodging just below the Syrian’s left ear, the pressure pushing upward, finally knocking loose whatever fibrous matter that had been holding the cleft halves of the man’s head together, painting the interior of the Opel with blood-brain-skull
• a tattered copy of the Koran dropping from a limp hand and hitting the blood-smeared floor.
Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret saw all of this but could not process the events. He was still trying to pull himself away from his bedroom back in Georgia and walk through the red, pulsing headache. When his paralysis finally broke, he turned and saw Sergeant Lumley lowering the M4 from his cheek.
“Good shooting, Sergeant,” he croaked. It was hardly the best thing to say in the aftermath of a Bronze Star Medal moment and he would certainly be more poetic in the citation he’d later compose back at his desk in the air-conditioned headquarters, but for now he was just grateful for Lumley’s immediate action, which saved a three-million-dollar tank, the crew members inside, the laughing-bleating-jeering hubbub of Iraqis, a few dozen goats, two EOD sergeants and their robot, piss-pants Shrinkle and his men, and Vic himself. “Good shooting,” he said again, unable to hide the shake in his voice. The ice water of a headache was already fountaining from the top of his skull and dripping across the rest of his brain. With the death of the Syrian, he’d once again seen Ross ignite: Falling Burning Man.
Lumley said nothing as he flicked the selector switch on his M4 back to safe. He looked at his men, all of them staring gape-jawed at him, and snapped, “What the fuck you lookin’ at? Get your asses out there and disperse that crowd! And for chrissakes somebody go up there, knock on that tank, and tell them it’s all clear!”
His men moved out and when they were safely out of sight Lumley stumbled behind the nearest Humvee, put his hands on his knees, and hurled up that morning’s breakfast.
It would be a long time, years and years of therapy, before he could wipe from his mind the sight of that head erupting in a bloody geyser. He’d pulled the trigger without thinking through the consequences. He was not sorry he hadn’t hesitated but there was always that nagging, niggling doubt: maybe haj
ji wasn’t going for the grenade; maybe he was reaching to unbuckle the seat belt so he could come out of the car in surrender; or maybe it was just a final muscular twitch of a man who was already dead.
Probably not, but still there was that maybe.
Lumley gagged once more, spit a loogey of bile, then wiped his mouth. Oh, well. Didn’t matter now, right? What’s done is done. What’s dead is dead. He took a sour breath. Pull your shit together, Lumley.
Later that night, Brock Lumley would dream he was standing in front of a Whac-A-Mole, sponge-rubber mallet in his hand. Each time the Syrian’s head popped up, Lumley smacked it with the mallet. The head would burst like a balloon and drench Lumley’s shirt with blood and viscera. Then another head, and another, and another.
The tank crew emerged from the hatch, their beige uniforms dark with sweat. They’d been told what had happened and now they looked over at Lumley, cheered, and gave him a thumbs-up.
He waved weakly and pulled his shit together.
One hour later—after the Abrams had pulled itself free of the Opel with a groan-shriek of metal, the EOD team had gone out to render the explosives completely neutral and retrieve the battery-dead robot, the Iraqi Security Forces had arrived on the scene to disperse the crowd and take charge of the dead terrorist, CNN had packed up their camera and microphone and zipped away in their shiny up-armored SUV, Lieutenant Colonel Duret had ordered Captain Shrinkle to have a preliminary after-action report on his desk no later than 1700 hours, and the infantrymen were allowed to piss and smoke before departure—the platoon was riding back to FOB Triumph and its population of soft-bellied Fobbits.
Lumley was a big guy who had to fold and stuff himself inside the front passenger seat of the Humvee every trip outside the concertina wire, but his eyes were small (“like two pieces of rabbit shit on snow,” his granddaddy used to say) and he kept his mouth so tight it was hard to tell what was going on inside. Even so, each time he came back from patrol, driving through the main gate of the FOB, his spleen rose between his teeth at the thought of all the coddled soldiers who never went beyond the wire. Fuck those high-ranking desk jockeys fat, dumb, and happy with their air-conditioning and the illusion they kept things under control in Iraq just by clicking a few icons on the computer screen, moving units around with a tidy drag-and-drop.
Lumley and the rest of the soldiers in his platoon were the ones making a difference in Iraq, not those lazy slugs. He’d be surprised if any of those support soldiers had ever pulled a trigger in their lives, apart from the annual trip to the M16 qualification range. They wouldn’t know a mosque from a mosquito.
Lumley’s men stared with glazed eyes out the windows of the Humvees, always scanning, scanning, scanning the rooftops, doorways, ditches for suspicious activity. Nobody said anything but a few cracked half-contained smiles when they thought about the way ole hajji’s head had popped like a blood-filled balloon when Sergeant Lumley’s bullet had done its work.
Soon they would pull into Triumph, clear their weapons at the checkpoint, ratcheting the bolts with a ka-ching, and reach down to pick up the ejected rounds. They would park at the motor pool, perform the post-op Preventive Maintenance Checks and Services, then head for showers, chow, and the soothing calm of an after-dinner cigar. Some would gather for the ongoing Xbox Halo tournament, some would e-mail their families, some would open Maxim to a wrinkled, dog-eared page and commence the nightly masturbation session, and some would lie on their cots in the spreading ink of night, stare at the ceiling of their hooch, try to push away the burst of a blood balloon now playing on a loop in their head and know it was no use—they’d have to deal with this for the rest of the deployment . . . and beyond.
The officers would also sit in the dark, variously watching Marx Brothers movies on their laptop (Shrinkle) and chewing Tylenol like candy (Duret).
One by one, they would all give way to the discomfort of restless sleep.
Just before the sun’s yolk broke over the horizon and the muezzins started singing from the mosques and the Blackhawk blades took to the sky with pulsing thumps and the morning’s mortars came down with metal shrieks, they would face another day—Duret, Shrinkle, Lumley, the three thousand soldiers, and even the Iraqis themselves—all prepared to meet more known unknowns.
3
GOODING
That morning, he had crept up behind Specialist Cinnamon Carnicle and then, just before a prankster giggle broke out of him, he coughed like a cat with a hair ball.
Cinnamon leaped up and yelped, “Jesus Harvey Christ!”
“Why so jumpy, Carnicle?” Staff Sergeant Gooding looked at her through narrow, amused eyes.
“They don’t call it the graveyard shift for nothing, Sar’nt,” she said as she scraped herself off the ceiling and settled back into her chair. Carnicle was the other enlisted soldier in the public affairs cell and was responsible for monitoring Significant Activity reports, restocking supplies, fielding phone calls from reporters in other time zones, and editing the Shamrock Division’s weekly camp newspaper, The Lucky Times. Most nights, it was quiet here in Saddam’s old palace, and that’s just the way she liked it. Peace and quiet in the middle of a loud war. “What are you doing here now, Sergeant Gooding? Isn’t it, like, two hours before shift change?”
“Couldn’t sleep.” He shrugged off his flak vest and dumped it in the gear pile next to the M16 rack. “I stayed up late watching the Star Wars bootleg and ended up eating a whole bag of care-package licorice which, let’s just say, didn’t sit too well with me.”
“You can eat the prunes my grandmother sent me last month, if it’ll help.”
Gooding ripped a fart, made a face, and said, “Sorry. Licorice is still backing up.”
“You couldn’t leave it outside, Sar’nt?”
“It comes and goes, Carnicle. Doesn’t let me have a say-so.” He sat down and logged on to his computer. “Anything interesting pop up on SMOG?”
“Not much. 1-3 was out on some neighborhood-knock mission that started at twenty-two hundred and didn’t really wrap up until an hour ago. SMOG was antsy all night long—kept interrupting my sleep to give updates over the loudspeaker every thirty minutes.”
“Poor girl. I’ll be sure and tell them to keep it down in there so they don’t bother you so much.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
Gooding walked over to the SMOG station. “So, any casualties?”
“One guy got bit in the nuts by a rottweiler but that’s about it.”
“A rottweiler? Where were they, South Harlem? What kind of Local National keeps a guard dog?”
“Apparently one who’s had his door kicked in one too many times. They had to zip-tie this guy and his wife just to get them to calm down. This, of course, after our guys shot the dog.”
“Nice.”
“Hey, the guy thought his nuts were bit clean off. Turns out he just got a bad bruising, that’s all. Didn’t even break the skin. He’ll probably get bed rest and an ice pack for a day, then he’ll be back on the street. Can’t keep a good man down, right?”
“This coming from someone who never had to walk around with a sack of nuts.”
“I never told you about my sex change, did I?”
“No, but it’s pretty obvious to everyone who meets you.”
“Ha,” Carnicle said, not a trace of laughter in her voice. “So, you’re releasing me from prison two hours early?”
“Sure,” Gooding said. “Go ahead and treat yourself to an extra course at breakfast.”
Carnicle logged off her computer and gathered her gear. When fully bundled into her military uniform and load-bearing equipment, she waddled like a beige penguin. She was short, with bowl-cropped hair and a face compacted with only the suggestion of a chin. She forbade anyone to call her “Cinnamon” but asked they keep it at “Carnicle, just Carnicle.” She wouldn’t even go by “Cindy,” as her hippie parents still called her, just as they called her sisters Nutmeg and Allspice by their cutesy nickname
s “Meg” and “Allie.” On the surface, Specialist Carnicle came as close to a manly man as someone with D-cup boobs could get, but no one knew her little secret: in the privacy of her hooch she spritzed the air with lavender room spray, slept in silk pajamas, and cuddled with a teddy bear (floppy neck, loose button eye, name of Chopin). Lord help the person who discovered this Jekyll to her Hyde because Carnicle stood at just the right height to deliver a crippling punch to the balls. Yes, she had plenty of secrets, but she kept them corralled behind her constricted features; she’d crack a smile every now and then but it was never just a smile; it was a controlled, crescent chink in her armor. After three months of working all-nighters her face had gone pasty and oily and she was still plagued with the coffee jitters but she wouldn’t trade the midnight peace of the palace for what she’d heard went on during the day. All that phone-jangling, cubicle-buzzing, KIA-peppering vibe coming from the Sig Act reports made her skin crawl and, if she’d had them, her nuts shrivel. No, thanks, she’d stay right here in the calm of the night shift, if it was all the same.
“So,” Gooding said, “besides Luthor-the-Nut-Crunching-Dog, anything big happen?”
“By ‘big,’ do you mean things like Captain Kilgore in G-6 spilling coffee on his desk and fritzing out half of G-3 Ops computers? Or one of the checkpoint guards coming down with what he thought was food poisoning and ralphing his guts all over the front desk and then for some reason feeling the need to broadcast this news over the loudspeaker? That kind of ‘big’?”