They passed under another overpass, training their weapons up at it, and then another. There was a crater in the road from a past IED explosion and the convoy slowed to go around it.
Suddenly a woman in a black abaya with two little boys appeared on the side of the highway ahead of them, near the wreckage of a car that hadn’t been cleared away yet. She was holding a basket. They were in Carrie’s field of fire.
“Two o’clock! Woman with a basket and children!” she called out. The woman beckoned at them, holding the basket toward them. My God! she thought. Was there an IED in the basket? She didn’t know what to do.
“Don’t fire yet,” Rabbit shouted as they trained their weapons on the woman and the two children. What is going on here? Carrie thought. What are we doing?
“Balah!” the woman cried, waving at them as they slowed to go around the wrecked car.
“Wait!” Carrie cried. “She’s selling dates!”
“Don’t shoot!” Rabbit shouted.
Carrie moved her finger away from the trigger. As they passed, the smaller of the boys waved at them. This place is surreal, she thought, her heart beating like a snare drum.
They slowed again at a highway checkpoint formed by APCs and manned by Iraqi Army soldiers watched over by a pair of U.S. Marines. The Iraqi soldiers waved them through with hardly a glance and they sped up again. A highway sign read, “Qadisaya Expressway.”
Suddenly, she heard an incredibly loud explosion and saw a massive orange fireball blossom a few hundred yards ahead of them. A blast of heat and a whiff of explosive came back at them like a hot wind.
“Shit,” Rabbit murmured.
“What is it?” Carrie asked.
“Convoy ahead of us,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
A minute later, they had to slow to drive around the shattered hulk of an SUV exactly like theirs, completely engulfed in flames, emitting a thick, acrid column of black smoke hundreds of feet into the air. Next to it was the smoldering hulk of another destroyed vehicle, nothing left of it but the chassis. Car bomb, Carrie thought automatically as they maneuvered past. She could feel the heat of the flames on her skin. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of explosive.
Because of the flames, she couldn’t see anyone inside, but there was a man’s arm lying yards away on the highway. They were going to drive right past it, maybe over it. Nauseous, she forced herself to swallow to keep from throwing up. As they drove by, she couldn’t take her eyes off the severed arm. It lay there, palm up, the fingers perfect, untouched, even relaxed looking. Two Blackwater men were carrying a third man, his upper body drenched in blood. They brought him to an SUV stopped in the middle of the highway, its door open.
It must’ve just happened, she thought, sickened and suddenly reminded of the way it had been for her in Iraq before, that this place was for real; she could die any second. She was suddenly terrified. And yet, she felt more alive than she had ever felt in her life. Each pore of her skin was like a receptor sensing every atom in the air around her.
This is like one of my flights, she thought. This was true insanity. And yet. And yet. This was who she truly was.
As they started to speed up, the M240 and the M4s from the right side of the Mamba in front of them opened up. Everyone on the right side of the Mamba, her side, was shooting. Following the flight of the machine gun’s tracers, it looked like they were firing at the roof of a sandstone-colored building about a hundred meters from the highway. God, she thought, seeing a flash of fire from there. Someone was shooting at them.
“Snipers. Fire, dammit!” Rabbit shouted, firing his M4 at the roof of the building as well.
Carrie tried, but she couldn’t see who was shooting at them, though her nerves screamed in expectation of a bullet hitting her at any second. The harsh rip of M4 bursts from Rabbit and the man behind her sounded unbelievably loud in her ears. She put her finger on the trigger, not knowing what to do as they drew opposite the building. Then she saw it.
She could see the outline of someone up there and before she realized what she was doing, she squeezed the trigger blindly, feeling the M4 move in her hands. She squeezed off another, the shots sounding very loud, although she was positive she hadn’t come near hitting whoever it was. Before she could even see what happened, they were speeding away. She felt a terrible urge to urinate and tightened to hold it in. She put the safety selector back to “Safe.”
After what seemed like an hour but must’ve been barely a minute later, they exited the highway, the lead Mamba honking and bumping into Iraqi cars to get them out of their way as they headed toward the Green Zone checkpoint. The streets were crowded with cars and motorbikes and people. Through the window came a smell of dust and diesel and rotting garbage.
The checkpoint was ahead of them: concertina wire; concrete blast walls, some decorated with graffiti; sandbags; concrete turn barriers in the roadway; a queue of cars and a long line of people going through inspection and metal detectors to get in, watched over by an M1 Abrams tank and a detachment of U.S. Army soldiers. They snaked their way around the serpentine turn barriers and stopped briefly at the checkpoint, where a contractor who looked exactly like a soldier except for the Blackwater shoulder patch on his shirt waved them on through.
Passing by the blast walls, it was as if they had landed on another planet. They were on a wide avenue lined with palm trees, villas with green lawns and gardens, monumental buildings with pointed domes like something out of The Arabian Nights and, in the distance, the sun shining on the Tigris River. They drove past a monument with giant crossed curved swords over the entrance to what looked like a vast parade ground. Near it was what looked like a big concrete flying saucer with its hatch open. She remembered it from her last trip, but Rabbit, assuming she was a newbie, pointed it out.
“Monument to the Unknown Soldier,” Rabbit said as they continued on down the avenue, finally turning left past some government buildings in grassy open spaces, then right onto Yafa Street and pulling up at the entrance to a tall building with a dry fountain with statues in front that sooner or later, every foreigner who wasn’t tied down in the military got to know: the Al-Rasheed Hotel.
“Do you want to check in or go over to the Convention Center?” Virgil asked as they unloaded. The Convention Center was where the Iraqi Provisional Government and U.S. government agencies had offices.
“Convention Center,” she said, checking the safety was back on and handing her M4 to Rabbit.
“You did good,” he said.
“I was scared to death,” she said.
“Me too.” He grinned and waved.
She and Virgil, pulling their rolling suitcases behind them, walked across the wide boulevard and showed their IDs to U.S. Marines stationed behind sandbags outside the Convention Center building’s wrought-iron and concrete fence. The Convention Center was a giant fortresslike building made of gray concrete. It looked like a fortification from World War I.
They showed their IDs again to American MPs manning the entrance and went inside. Instantly, they were hit by the air-conditioning, and after asking, they eventually found an office with a sign on the door that said “USAID Baghdad,” the U.S. government aid agency. They knocked and went inside.
They were shown to an office waiting room, where they sat and waited while a young American man in a Marine Service C uniform shirt and tie, military written all over him, went to get someone. A U.S. Marine captain, also in Service Cs, came out of an inner office.
He was about six feet tall, athletic, good-looking, with dark wavy hair longer than the normal Marine’s, blue eyes and a Tom Cruise smile.
“I’m Ryan Dempsey. You must be Virgil and Carrie. Welcome to the Sandbox,” he said, shaking their hands. When he touched her hand she felt a tingle like nothing she’d experienced since the first time she’d met her poly sci professor, John, at Princeton so long ago. It’s the adrenaline, she told herself, the thrill of surviving the drive, of being alive. But taking a go
od look at Captain Dempsey, she knew it wasn’t true.
Oh shit, she thought. I’m in trouble.
CHAPTER 27
Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq
They were at a small table at the BCC, the Baghdad Country Club. A white cinder-block house with blue trim on a residential street near the river, it was one of the few places in Baghdad where the booze flowed freely. The club was packed with Green Zone expats who came here instead of the bars at the Al-Rasheed or the Palestine Hotel because with the Shiites trying to form a government, the hotels didn’t openly serve alcohol.
There were men in uniforms from a dozen different Coalition countries—Brits, Canadians, Aussies, Poles, Georgians, U.S. embassy and Provisional Government officials—and contractors from private military companies like Blackwater, DynCorp, KBR-Halliburton and a hundred others. More and more, the war had been subcontracted to these private companies and they had practically taken over. The bar and adjoining rooms were crammed with their employees, hired from every corner of the earth at Wall Street–like wages, speaking dozens of languages and spending money like it was going out of style. Jet planes taking off couldn’t have matched the noise level, and female waitresses who didn’t mind a pat on the butt could make a thousand dollars a night.
Carrie was sitting with Virgil and Dempsey, who was really a Marine captain on loan to the CIA, using the USAID office cover, from Task Force 145, a shadowy outfit fighting the insurgency.
Joining them was an Iraqi national, Warzer Zafir, officially a translator for the U.S. embassy, unofficially also from Task Force 145. The Iraqi was mid-thirties with dark hair, a three-day stubble, a straight nose sharp as an ax blade. Also attractive, Carrie thought. At the table next to them, a trio of Aussies was loudly celebrating an Australian cricket victory over “those donger South African whackers, mate.”
“I speak Arabic. I don’t need a translator,” Carrie had told Dempsey back in his office.
“Warzer has other virtues,” he said.
“Like what?”
“He’s from Ramadi,” Dempsey said.
“What about Ramadi?” Carrie asked.
Now, at the BCC, draining a Heineken, Dempsey told them:
“You guys need to understand what’s going on. Iraq’s changed since you were here last. Over the past two weeks, more than three hundred bodies, most burned, tortured beyond recognition, have shown up here in Baghdad alone. Our troops are getting it from all sides. IEDs and snipers on every block. It’s hard to tell who the Iraqis hate more, us or each other.
“The Sunnis will never accept Jaafari as prime minister.” He leaned closer. “This insurgency has legs. AQI is getting stronger. They’re on the verge of taking over Anbar. We’re talking from the outskirts of Baghdad all the way to the Syrian border. People are scared shitless. Last week, two U.S. Army Rangers from the Seventy-Fifth went missing in Ramadi. An hour later they turned up minus their heads.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Carrie said. “You’ve seen the photo. Do we have anybody who’s seen him?”
Both Dempsey and Warzer shook their heads.
“Even if somebody did recognize him, they’d never talk. What you Americans don’t understand,” Warzer said, “is that it’s not like Democrats and Republicans. If the Shiites take over, they’ll kill all the Sunnis. They fear if we take over, we’ll do the same. Saddam was a pig,” he said, his face contorted, “and I’m glad he’s been caught. But when he ran things, only some people died. Not everyone.”
“I need someone from AQI. I heard you had a prisoner,” she said to Dempsey.
Dempsey nodded. “While I was with the Seventh Marines, before all this spook shit, we captured an AQI commander in Fallujah. But they’re tough to interrogate. They’re not only not afraid to die, they want to die.”
“What’s his name?”
“He goes by Abu Ammar,” Dempsey said.
“That’s his kunya, his nom de guerre, not his name. Interesting he chose Abu Ammar,” Carrie said.
“Why?”
“Yasser Arafat used it. Ammar was a companion of the Prophet. Maybe our ‘Father of Ammar’ has delusions of grandeur. Where do you have him?”
“Abu Ghraib.”
“The same place they did all the tortures and stuff?” Virgil asked. Two years earlier, leaked photographs of U.S. servicemen and women torturing and sexually humiliating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison had been a worldwide political disaster for the United States.
“When you’ve seen what I’ve seen . . . ,” Dempsey said, then shrugged, as if Iraq were quantum physics, impossible to explain to laymen.
“Have you bugged his cell?” Carrie asked.
Dempsey shook his head.
“Shit.” She frowned. “Does anyone have a clue what his real name is?”
“We have a snitch in there. Swears our Ammar is from Ramadi, which makes sense, and that his real name is Walid. We don’t know his last name.”
“Why does Ramadi make sense?” she asked.
“Because it’s the heart of the insurgency. It’s rumored that’s where Abu Nazir is.” He leaned closer. “I have to tell you, CENTCOM is planning a major operation in Ramadi,” he whispered in her ear.
“When?” she whispered back.
“Soon. You don’t have much time.”
“So no one’s seen Abu Nazir or Abu Ubaida?” Virgil asked.
“They say if you see them,” Warzer put in, “it’s the last thing your eyes ever see.”
Dempsey looked around and motioned them closer. They all leaned in.
“So what’s next? We go to Abu Ghraib for you to interrogate Ammar?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Ramadi.”
“Forgive me, al-Anesah Carrie,” Warzer said. “But you are a little new in Iraq. Ramadi is . . .” He searched for the word. “You cannot imagine how dangerous.”
“We’ve already seen how dangerous Baghdad is,” Virgil said.
Warzer looked at Carrie and Virgil with his dark brown eyes. “Baghdad is nothing. Ramadi is death,” he said quietly.
“We have no choice. I need to talk to his family,” she said.
Dempsey grinned. “There’s one born every minute,” he said.
“What? A fool?” Virgil asked.
“Worse,” he said, still grinning. “An optimist.”
From the open door to her balcony at the Al-Rasheed Hotel, she could see the lights atop the Fourteenth of July Bridge over the Tigris River. The half of the city on the other side of the river was in pitch darkness, the power more often off than on, the curving river a silver ribbon in the moonlight.
From beyond the Green Zone she heard the crump of an explosion and the rattle of automatic weapons. Looking that way, she saw a line of red tracer bullets, trailing dreamlike across the darkness. The shooting stopped, then it started again, as much a part of the night sounds of this city as police sirens and cleaning trucks in an American city.
She went back in her mind to the same old question: What was Fielding’s secret? What had he been hiding? Why did he kill himself?
Why does anyone? Why did her father try? Where in this night was her mother? Wasn’t her leaving also a kind of suicide, a killing of her old life? Was that why she had never tried to contact any of them, not even her own children? Saul was right, she thought. We’re all hiding something.
When her father finally got on clozapine, he tried to reconnect. It was as if she had never really known Frank Mathison, the Frank Mathison who had been in Vietnam—and she hadn’t even known that about him till she found a photograph in a box in his closet, him shirtless, looking incredibly young and skinny, cradling an M14 in a jungle clearing with two friends, all of them grinning at the camera, shitfaced on whatever they were smoking, the Frank Mathison her mother had married before it all got really bad. He had moved in with her sister, Maggie, and Maggie’s husband, Todd. He was in therapy, basically normal now, according to Maggie.
“He wants to see you,” Maggie had said. “H
e needs to reconnect. It’s important for his process.”
“His process? What about mine?” she’d snapped.
She wouldn’t let him get close. If she saw him at Maggie’s house, she’d say, “Hello, Dad,” “Good-bye, Dad,” and that was all. Because she couldn’t forget; her bizarre childhood a Ping-Pong match between gibberish and silence. And because he might seem normal, but she knew the craziness was hiding in him, waiting to get out the second you turned your head away.
And what about her? Her craziness?
Son of a bitch, she needed a drink. And jazz. She got her iPod ready. Just then, there was a knock on the door.
It was Dempsey, filling the doorway. Still in his service shirt and pants, a few drinks further to the wind than he had been at the Baghdad Country Club. The way he looked at her thrilled her to her core—Damn, he was a good-looking man.
“I want the truth. Are you married?” she asked.
“What difference does it make?” he said, not taking his blue eyes off her.
“I don’t know, but it does. Are you?”
“I’m between,” he said, as if marriages were military assignments, temporary postings, and then you moved on to the next.
“Oh shit,” she said, the two of them coming together like atoms smashing, tearing off their clothes as he came into the room, kissing each other like the world was ending. They stumbled to the bed and as she wrapped her legs around his hips, feeling him push himself inside her, some part of her heard a pair of loud explosions this side of the river followed by a renewed outburst of automatic-weapons fire.
CHAPTER 28
Abu Ghraib Prison, Anbar Province, Iraq
They brought Abu Ammar, a.k.a. Walid, in manacles into the interrogation room where Carrie was waiting. The room was bare: concrete walls and two wooden chairs facing each other, nothing else. She gestured for him to sit down and after a moment, he did.
“Salaam alaikum,” she said to him, gesturing to the two U.S. soldiers who had brought him to leave. Walid didn’t respond with “Wa alaikum salaam” as Arab courtesy demanded. He was a thin man with close-cropped hair and a ragged beard in an orange prisoner’s jumpsuit with a nervous tick that caused him to jerk his head slightly sideways every few seconds. She wondered if it was natural or a result of his imprisonment and past interrogations.
Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 19