“Jeez, Saul. Can you give me a hint?” Fielding asked.
Saul shook his head. “Your ears only. I don’t want these two”—he indicated Carrie and Virgil—“to know. I’ll be by shortly. I promise.”
Fielding studied Saul for a moment as if trying to decide whether to believe him. “So you know, I’ve got some of my guys coming,” he said. “We didn’t want a repeat of Achilles.”
“Call ’em off. We won’t need them,” Saul said, waving him away. “I’ll brief you in an hour, okay?”
Fielding nodded and, not taking his eyes off Saul, left the apartment.
“Are you completely insane? Do you know what that asshole—” she started to say, but Saul put his finger to his lips to stop her and looked at Virgil, who went to the door and opened it to make sure Fielding was gone. “What’s going on? Why’d you want to see me alone?”
Saul broke into a grin. Virgil, looking at the two of them, smiled.
“Do you know what you did? Have you any idea?” Saul said.
“What are you talking about?”
“That picture you sent. The one from the contact you tracked down, that Marielle.”
“The man, Mohammed Siddiqi. What about him?”
Saul leaned forward and touched her arm. “Well, according to your former boss Alan Yerushenko and his entire team, plus everyone at NESA, they are telling us with a seventy-plus percent probability that what you sent, the person you identified as one Mohammed Siddiqi, a so-called Qatari, who, by the way, according to Doha doesn’t exist, is the only known photograph of Abu Ubaida, right-hand man and number two of Abu Nazir, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the person in all likelihood behind the attacks in New York.”
She rocked back, stunned. Unbelievable, she thought. One minute she was being shipped off to Poland and now suddenly she had just hit a home run to win a World Series game.
“What about Fielding?” she asked.
“When he gets off the plane, Langley’ll handle it.” He frowned. “It won’t be pleasant. I don’t know what in the name of God he was thinking. Or how deep he’s in, or with whom.”
“What about Langley? Am I off the shit list?”
Saul grinned. “Are you kidding? As far as the director’s concerned, you are the prom queen, Wonder Woman and the female James Bond rolled into one. Yerushenko said if he wasn’t already married and a grandfather, he’d marry you. We finally have a shot at getting this son of a bitch.”
“What about David?” she asked, not looking at him.
“Estes too.”
“So why’d you say I was leaving? I’ve got a lot more to do here.”
He shook his head. “You’re going to Baghdad. Your flight leaves in four hours. You have a new mission. It’s all yours. You’re running it.”
“Which is?”
“This is from Bill Walden himself. Bring us the heads of Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir. Al-Qaeda’s on the verge of taking over all of Anbar Province in Iraq. The country’s about to explode into civil war. Our troops are caught in the middle. It’ll be a bloodbath. The Defense Intelligence guys’ve got casualty estimates you wouldn’t believe. The only way to stop it is to stop those two.”
“Why me?”
“I understand. This is big. But you found him. You have a better feel for him than any of us. You speak Arabic like a native. Who better? You were born for this, Carrie.”
“And maybe a little justice for Dima. And Rana,” she murmured.
“Ah, Carrie,” he sighed. “Don’t look for justice in this life. You’ll be a whole lot less disappointed.”
“The targets. How do you want ’em? Dead or alive?” she asked.
“In a million pieces for all I care. Just get the bastards,” Saul said through gritted teeth.
She and Virgil were in a taxi heading down Rue Ouzai toward the airport. The road was crowded and noisy, even this late at night. The buildings near the coast were old and cracked, with washing and black banners with white lettering proclaiming, “Death to Israel,” hanging from their balconies.
She’d gone back to Virgil’s place to pack. When she started to fold her Terani dress, Virgil just shook his head.
“Won’t have much use for that in Baghdad,” he said.
“Probably not,” she said, folding it and putting it in the suitcase, not knowing what else to do with it.
When they were ready, they headed for the cemetery near Boulevard Bayhoum so she could leave a message in the dead drop letting Julia/Fatima know she had to leave again. She told her to stay safe. She didn’t have to mention what they both knew: that the bombs were coming.
“What about Julia’s warning about Hezbollah and the Israelis?” she’d asked Saul when they were still at the safe house apartment. “She’s been solid gold. There’s a war coming. It’s only a matter of weeks or months.”
“We’ve kicked it upstairs. It was in the President’s Daily Brief. Estes made sure the president saw it,” Saul said.
“Are they warning the Israelis?”
Saul raised his hands in a gesture that somehow inexplicably encompassed two thousand years of Jewish history. “That’s up to the administration. Sharing with other countries isn’t intelligence, it’s politics,” he said.
“Even allies?” she asked.
“Especially allies.”
“If it happens, Lebanon will get the worst of it,” she said, pouring the last of the Belvedere into glasses for the three of them.
“Always. L’chaim,” he said, raising his glass.
“Up yours,” Virgil said, and drank.
Looking out the window, she saw the outline of a palm tree silhouetted against the ugly slum buildings in the headlights of passing traffic and she felt something tug at her.
“I’m going to miss Beirut,” she said to Virgil. There was something about this life, these people. A kind of gallant madness. What was it Marielle had said? That they lived on “a bridge over an abyss.”
“It’s not Virginia,” he nodded. A road sign indicated the airport was up ahead.
Her cell phone rang. It was Saul.
“Carrie?” he said.
“We’re almost at the airport,” she responded.
“Fielding’s dead.”
She felt a sudden vacuum, a hole open in the pit of her stomach. She’d hated him, but still. Unable to stop herself, she thought about her father, feeling sick at the memory of finding him the day before Thanksgiving, seeing what he had done to himself and rushing him to the hospital in an ambulance, thinking I’m sorry, Dad, so sorry, and in a horrible awful way, wishing she hadn’t come home early at the same time.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Gunshot to the head. Looks like suicide.”
Virgil glanced over at her, wondering what was happening, then straight ahead, squinting against the headlights from oncoming cars.
“We’re coming back,” she said. “We need to get to the bottom of this.”
“Carrie, he wasn’t stupid. He knew what was coming.”
“Saul, listen to me. He was a lying piece of shit, a pathetic excuse for a human being, but he wouldn’t do this. Not this. He wasn’t the type.”
“What type do you think he was?”
“The kind who thought he was smarter than anybody. That no one could touch him. He would always come out on top.” She tapped Virgil’s arm. “Listen, just wait for me. We’re coming back.”
“Don’t. That’s an order. Iraq’s too important. Besides, whatever caused this, the answers are in Baghdad,” he said.
CHAPTER 26
Route Irish, Baghdad, Iraq
Demon was talking under the metal arches in the waiting area at Baghdad International Airport. A stocky ex-military type with an Alfred E. Neuman gap between his front teeth, he was dressed in desert BDUs with a pirate skull and crossbones painted on his armored vest and the word “Demon” on his military helmet. He wore no shirt under the vest and his gym-built arms and neck were covered with cobra and devil-face tattoos. Like th
e other members of their Blackwater company escort team, he wore an ammo belt with extra magazines and a pair of hand grenades hanging like deadly fruit across his chest, an M4 carbine cradled in the crook of his arm.
Although it was before nine in the morning, Carrie was already sweating. The temperature was over ninety degrees on this early April day and it felt like it was going to get a lot hotter. Like the others, she was wearing an armor vest and Kevlar helmet and awkwardly carried a Blackwater-issued M4, a weapon she had never touched before. Virgil, next to her, looking equally uncomfortable, wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve.
It had been seven months since she had been in Iraq, but the heat, the private military companies, the sense of war the minute you flew in brought it all back almost as if she had never left, as if Beirut had never happened. Hard to believe it had been less than two months since it had all started with Nightingale’s attempt to kidnap her in Beirut. The ninth of April now. Back in the States, spring break, April Fool’s, tax season and the end of March Madness. As if she were on a run, where time seemed both compressed and endless simultaneously. Back in Iraq now, she thought grimly. Only this time she had a lead.
During the layover in Amman, she’d gone to the ladies’ room in the airport, where a female agent from Amman Station, an attractive young Arab-American woman, had slipped her an encrypted cell phone under the stall partition and she’d used it to call Saul.
“What about the thing I gave you?” she’d asked him. Nightingale’s cell phone.
“Still working on it. After every time he met Rana, he called the same cell number in Iraq.”
“Where?”
“All over. Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi. Last one was Ramadi.”
“So do we think that’s where Abu you-know-who is?” she whispered into the phone.
“Ubaida? Yes. Carrie?”
“I’m here.”
“Watch yourself. You’re in the red zone.” Things must really be bad if he thought he had to warn her, she thought. From the news on TV she knew the war, which had been bad when she had left Iraq, was amping up. Or was he warning her about something else? Like a major escalation or AQI op?
“Saul, is something coming?”
“It usually is,” he said.
Demon was briefing them on what to expect on the drive into Baghdad’s Green Zone from the airport. They stood with a group of contractors for Blackwater and other security companies and a pair of CNN reporters who’d just flown in with them from Amman.
“Listen up. I’m only gonna say this once and I don’t give a shit if you listen because you may not be alive long enough for it to matter,” Demon said in a way that let Carrie understand he’d given this speech plenty of times before. “It’s only six miles from here to the Green Zone. It’s a flat, mostly straight route on the Airport Road, a.k.a. ‘Route Irish’ for you newbies, a.k.a. ‘RPG Alley’ for those of you who are actually paying attention. We’ll be there in ten minutes. No big deal, right?” He grinned, showing the gap in his teeth.
“We’ll be in two convoys of five vehicles each. Each will have three armored Chevy Suburbans and an armored Blackwater Mamba truck with an M240 machine gun on the roof in the lead and another Mamba to bring up the rear. Now, some of you new people,” he said, looking around at them, “may be thinking this is all a bit of overkill. Some of you may look at our big fat-ass American vehicles and feel a little safer with all that steel plate welded on them. Trust me, with the amount of RDX explosive our little jihadi brothers use, the armor around you is about as effective as tissue paper.
“Each of you will be assigned a field of vision to watch as we go. Keep your eyes open. Do not fire your weapon unless I yell ‘Fire!’ I mean it. If I do tell you to shoot, you better do it or I’ll shoot you myself. Now, at this point, some smartass might be saying to himself, ‘This is bullshit, Jack.’
“Okay, bullshit. But just for the record, yesterday there were twenty-one attacks on American convoys on this same road. We had two fatalities. But today, you lucky people, is the day before the big Mawlid al-Nabi holiday. The birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. So we can expect the ragheads to up the ante. By the way, it’s the Sunni holiday, so in addition to attacks on us, we can expect explosions and car bombs at Sunni mosques and markets. Five days from now is the Shiite version of Mawlid al-Nabi and we get to do the whole damn thing all over again. Briefing’s over. We’ll either get through or we won’t. Any questions?”
He looked at them. A couple of the contractors shuffled their feet, but no one said anything.
“Okay, boys and girl”—he nodded to Carrie, the only woman—“get ready for the longest ten minutes of your life. Let’s get the hell outta here,” he said, and turned and walked away. After a moment, they followed him outside the terminal. The gray Mambas and black SUVs were lined up at the curb in the blazing sun.
Rabbit, an ex-marine with cropped peach-fuzz hair, told Carrie and Virgil which SUV to get into and where to sit and gave them their field-of-fire assignments. They were in the second convoy. Carrie’s seat was in the middle row, right side.
“What are we looking for?” she asked Rabbit. She’d done this before, last time she had been here, but from everything around her, it was clear things had changed.
“Any vehicle that doesn’t stay the hell away from us. Anything. Women, kids, a pile of garbage where it shouldn’t be,” he said. “If anyone comes close, yell ‘imshi.’ It means—”
“I know what it means,” she snapped.
“I’ll bet you do.” He nodded.
She checked her M4. It was loaded with a standard thirty-round magazine. The safety selector lever on the left side was on “Safe.” She brushed a fly off her face and hoped to God she wouldn’t have to use it.
Waiting at Beirut airport and on the flight to Amman and the second flight to Baghdad, Virgil next to her reading a paperback, she’d mostly listened to John Coltrane on her iPod, cool romantic tracks like “Body and Soul,” and thought about Fielding’s suicide. The question was why. It couldn’t have been because of what was waiting for him at Langley. Fielding was the kind of asshole who had always gotten away with things his whole life. He would’ve figured he’d find a way out of this too. So why had he done it? What was he hiding? And what did it have to do with Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir?
The SUV and the Mambas were loaded up and waiting. Rabbit was sitting in front of her in the “shotgun” passenger seat. Although the air-conditioning was on, the SUV was hot with the windows partially rolled down, their weapons poking out. The radio crackled. She heard Demon’s voice say, “Keep your eyes open and your sphincters tight. Let’s roll.”
The lead Mamba started to move forward and their SUV followed right behind it, the Mamba’s Blackwater company flag, black with a white bear’s paw, flying from the open roof-hatch cover. The convoy circled on the access road and headed for the airport gate. Carrie could see it up ahead through the windshield. The gate was heavily sandbagged, with concrete barriers that forced vehicles to make sharp back-and-forth turns before they could enter the airport. It was operated by Blackwater guards in full body armor manning machine guns.
A sign next to the gate read, “Leaving Airport Zone. Condition Red.” Virgil leaned over and whispered in her ear that “Condition Red” meant weapons ready to fire. As they approached the barrier arm across the road, Demon’s voice crackled over the radio:
“Lock and load, people. Safeties off. No tourists on this bus.”
There was a sound of clacking as everyone racked the charging handles on their weapons. Carrie moved the lever from “Safe” to “Semi” instead of “Burst” as she’d been shown. This is insane, she thought. She had no idea how to use this weapon and she wasn’t sure she could hit anything.
They drove out of the airport onto a highway surrounded by desert. Right out of the gate she saw palm trees, trunks blackened and tops sheared off by explosions. Along the side of the highway was a long column of twisted wreckage, the c
harred and blackened remains of SUVs and trucks. Just by the amount of debris, it was clear that things had gotten a lot worse since she had been here last. A wide highway divider with flat ground, scrub and palm trees separated them from oncoming traffic.
Their SUV sped up. They were moving faster now, about sixty miles per hour. Carrie wiped the sweat out of her eyes. Along her side of the road was more of the same. Charred chassis of vehicles, mangled palm trees and scrub. In front of them was the lead Mamba, with someone on top manning the machine gun and ahead, the road, partially obscured in the distance by a yellow veil of dust. Stirred up, she assumed, from the first convoy, a couple of minutes ahead of theirs.
“Overpass ahead,” Rabbit said over his shoulder. “Get ready. The hajis like to drop grenades and IEDs down on us. Eyes open. You won’t see them till they pop up.”
“Mother,” Virgil muttered, throwing a look at Carrie indicating he didn’t like this any more than she did.
They drove under the overpass, every nerve in her body expecting something to come down on them. As they came out of the shadow, she looked back but didn’t see anyone. She was about to draw a breath when the radio crackled again.
“Get ready, people. IED Junction. Here’s where the fun starts,” Demon’s voice said.
“Always something at least once a day here,” Rabbit said, hunching over his weapon.
Carrie saw what he meant. A number of cars entered onto the highway from a feeder road. One of them, a taxi with two Arab men wearing checked kaffiyehs in the front seat, pulled toward them.
“Imshi! Get away, dammit!” Rabbit shouted, and fired a warning burst right in front of the taxi’s front bumper, gesturing for them to back off. The taxi driver glared at them, but slowed and pulled away. Ahead, the lead Mamba was honking its horn constantly, but she couldn’t see at what. Then she saw the Mamba deliberately bump into the rear of a car in front of it and watched as the car pulled over to the side of the road to get out of the way.
Now she saw that one car after another was pulling over to the side of the highway to let their convoy by, the Iraqis in them watching them from the side of the road, their expressions unreadable.
Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 18