by Richard Fox
“You wanted a discussion, and you got one. You’re an infantry officer. You see things in stark terms of right and wrong. Black and white. I’m an intelligence officer. Everything exists in shades of gray,” Ritter said.
“No, you’re an officer in the United States Army.” Shelton pointed to those words on Ritter’s uniform. “There’s no shade of gray when it comes to duty and honor. So next time you have a chance to influence the minds of young leaders, don’t you forget that.”
“Next time you want me to spout buzzwords and missives from the Pentagon, just leave me out of the conversation,” Ritter countered.
Shelton shook his head in disbelief. “What the hell happened to you? You weren’t like this before.”
“I don’t know. Maybe too much time staring into the abyss,” Ritter said. Shelton was right; during their last stint in Iraq, these sorts of conversations had never happened. Now their roles were different. Shelton was the commander of an infantry company deep in hostile territory. Ritter wasn’t a plain, simple intelligence officer anymore. The Caliban Program had him, and Ritter didn’t know if it would ever let him go.
Shelton slapped his friend on the shoulder. “Hey, this tour is a kick in the nuts compared to last time. Stay focused, and we’ll get through it.”
“Yeah, you’re right. When are you going home for midtour leave?”
“With everything we’ve got going on? Next never,” Shelton said.
Abu Ahmet crept into the empty chicken coop with a shovel in one hand and his pistol in the other. Salim had kept over one hundred chickens in the coop; he’d killed them all during the avian flu scare from a few years ago and had had no money to replace the birds. Salim had turned to arms smuggling to make ends meet, but his big mouth had gotten the Americans on his trail, and Salim would spend the next five years at Bucca prison for possession of several RPG rounds.
Abu Ahmet walked to the southeast corner. The smell of chicken droppings was strong; someone had dug into the dirt floor before packing it solid again, aerating the soil and excavating fossilized chicken droppings. He holstered his pistol and started digging. His second shovel revealed a plastic tub buried in the dirt. He fell to his knees and pushed away the dirt.
“You need any help in there?” Theeb said from the other side of the wall.
“Just keep your eyes open,” Abu Ahmet said. He jimmied the top of the tub open, then lifted the lid completely off. He found bricks of Iraqi dinar wrapped in rubber bands next to ammunition cans of 7.62mm bullets. A yellow piece of paper on top of the ammo read, “One more case, rifles and bullets.”
Abu Ahmet rubbed his hands together, then grabbed a brick of dinar in each hand. He held more money in one hand than he could make in a year. He squeezed the money against his chest and laughed.
“Theeb! The Americans sent their Santa Claus!”
Chapter 21
Davis flipped through the detainee-holding-area log sheet for the fifth time. The Iraqi who’d fired the mortar rounds was on the log; that was no surprise to Davis since she’d processed him the moment they returned to brigade headquarters. But the detainee she’d helped capture—Abdul Karim, the bomb maker—wasn’t in the holding area. He wasn’t in the log sheets as arriving or departing, and he wasn’t in any of the detainee databases the army used across the country.
Abdul Karim hadn’t received any medical treatment at the hospital for detainees either. She’d called that hospital so many times that the lieutenant colonel in charge had growled at her over the phone, telling her to stop calling and asking about him.
Private Rasha had said a group of military police were waiting for them when their helicopter returned to the brigade headquarters. The MPs said they’d take the detainee straight to the holding area, and that Rasha was done watching him. Rasha also said she’d never seen those MPs before, and they definitely weren’t part of the squad working for Davis at her holding area.
Davis had no choice but to make several embarrassing phone calls to the other units on Camp Victory to see if someone had accidentally picked up her detainee and taken him to the wrong jail. There was no sign of Abdul Karim anywhere.
She dreaded her final option: admitting to Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds that there was a ghost detainee. Ghost detainees weren’t unheard of. Sometimes a detainee gave a fake name after transferring from one holding area to another. The detainee’s new name was clean, and after much head scratching, whoever had held the detainee would let him or her ago with an apology and pocket change for his or her inconvenience. The army responded to the problem with several expensive and complex layers of detainee tracking that depended on multiple units across the country to use a particular communications pipeline and reporting system. Naturally, it never worked right.
She placed a copy of the brigade operations log, with the entry identifying Abdul Karim’s capture highlighted, in the folder and readied herself for what would surely be an epic meltdown by Reynolds. He could barely handle cold coffee; the loss of the one detainee who had some knowledge of the missing Soldiers might cause his head to explode.
Reynolds was at his perch, watching the operations floor like a buzzard waiting for a target to present itself. Davis walked up to his desk and stood at attention. Reynolds ignored her.
She cleared her throat. “Sir, we have a situation with a detainee,” she said.
Reynolds swiveled his chair around to face her. He said nothing.
“The detainee Dragon Company got after the medical visit, an Abdul Karim.”
Reynolds stared right through her, seemingly oblivious.
Davis had seen this look before when one of the battalion liaison officers had reported a lost rifle. Reynolds had chewed the liaison officer out at full volume for ten minutes. It was bad enough to be the messenger of bad news; as the officer in charge of the detainee population, blame for the ghost detainee would be hers. “He isn’t in our system. There’s no record of him arriving at our holding area, and I can’t find him anywhere else—at Victory base or the detainee hospital in the Green Zone.”
Reynolds’s jaw worked from side to side as he stood up. His nostrils flared as he took in a deep breath.
“Attention in the TOC!” Colonel Townsend said as he stormed into the Tactical Operations Center. Reynolds brandished a finger at Davis before turning to the brigade commander.
The room was silent as Townsend made his way to the map board. He unsheathed his pointer and snapped it against a place on the map on the west bank of the Euphrates River, a place where the brigade had no presence, a place no American had been to since the war began.
“We have a time-sensitive target. Nothing else in the brigade matters more than getting boots on this piece of ground in the next few hours,” he said.
Davis looked over at Major Hibou, who was mentoring Davis’s replacement as the drone platoon leader. He looked at her and shrugged. Wonderful, she thought. Operations is driving the intelligence, just like the mess at the power plant. A civilian man with the stature of a linebacker and an impressive beard tapped Hibou on the shoulder, then led him out of the room.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Townsend said as he leveled his pointer at a warrant officer, who had pilot wings on his uniform.
Carlos watched as a delayed panic set in to the TOC. The pregnant seconds between Colonel Townsend’s instructions and the inevitably frantic activity was akin to the instant after someone slams a finger in a car door; it doesn’t hurt at first, but the victim knows he or she is about to feel something horrible.
This was all wrong. While he respected the Soldiers in the unit, he’d started off as a knuckle-dragging grunt in the Gulf War; they were amateurs—rangers, Green Berets, Delta Force, or any other type and color of a Special Forces unit in Iraq should execute a mission like this. There was a team on standby just up the road at his compound, and they could be airborne for this target within an hour. Yet here he was, waiting for this line unit to shift into gear.
It had
taken nine hours for him and Mike to break the bomb maker some lieutenant had found behind a closet. Carlos saw the lieutenant huddled around the ISR desk, pointing at a screen that showed the blue icons of the unit’s drones. The white lines showed their trails now reorienting west to the Euphrates. Shannon asked him to keep an eye on her, as her relationship with Ritter could complicate matters. The lieutenant was easy on the eyes, he had to admit.
Shannon. He still didn’t understand that woman despite their years together. She was the one who wanted Ritter’s unit to hop across the river and see if the bomb maker’s confessions were true. She was the one who’d vetoed Special Forces hitting the target or even allowing them to participate. At least the gung-ho Colonel Townsend was eager and willing.
Davis took a sheet of paper from a printer along the wall a few yards from Carlos; her gaze lingered on him as she took the paper back to the ISR station.
Carlos knew he stood out in his civilian clothes and beard. If anyone asked, he’d identify himself as a liaison officer and stonewall from there. He was just here to alert Shannon if this raid turned up anything of value.
Davis’s pace quickened as she kept reading. She breezed right past Major Hibou, who stopped her before she could make it to Townsend.
Hibou and Davis pulled away from the scrum and spoke to each other near the copy machine. Carlos took a few nonchalant steps closer.
“Sir, if this is right, then we’ll have black air in a couple more hours,” Davis said. The words black air raised the hair on the back of his neck; bad weather was the Achilles’ heel of any air-assault operation.
“If being the operative word, Lieutenant. There’s enough of a buffer for them to get in and get out.”
“But if something goes wrong—”
“Nothing will go wrong. We don’t need to show this to the commander. His mind is made up.” Hibou took the paper from Davis and folded it before sticking it in his pocket. With the conversation ended, he went back to the floor.
The longer this went on, the less Carlos liked it.
Nesbitt stuffed a backpack with Pop-Tarts and unwanted MRE packets of crackers and fruit bars. Thomas picked the last ramen packet from a cardboard box and put it into his assault pack, which was full to bursting with processed carbohydrates.
“You think this is enough?” Nesbitt asked.
“Man, I don’t even know where the hell we’re going or what the hell we’re doing,” Thomas said, struggling to close the zipper on his pack.
“Nesbitt! Get your ass back out here!” someone yelled from beyond the confines of the mess hall. Nesbitt cursed under his breath and ran out of the building. Thomas was right behind him.
“Gather round and take a knee, all of you,” Shelton said to the two dozen Soldiers and one Iraqi interpreter at the edge of the helicopter pad. They gravitated toward their commander and bunched together as best they could. Shelton looked over his men, their faces bright against their fingertip-to-toe-tip covering of digital-patterned camouflage. Apprehension danced behind their eyes; only Ritter seemed nonplussed by the sudden mission.
“Men, we have a target, a target who probably knows where our missing brothers are being held.” He sauntered across the line his men made, sure to make eye contact with each one as he spoke. He prayed this would convey some confidence and determination, because the details of this mission would rob their confidence.
“There’s a farmhouse in a piece-of-shit village called Owesat. Owesat is on the other side of the Euphrates River. We are going to air assault to the target, find a Saudi Arabian that has a connection to the mastermind behind the kidnapping, and get the hell out of Dodge before hajji can do anything about it.” He looked over his men as he spoke, on the lookout for fear.
Porter raised his hand; his armor had a multitude of pressure bandages, medical tape, and a set of surgeon’s sheers hooked to its front. “Sir, why don’t we bring the rest of the company?” He had the look of a man told that he’d have the honor of charging a machine gun nest.
“Because brigade can shit us two Black Hawks and only two Black Hawks. The target house is some sort of al-Qaeda R and R area, and they have no idea we’re coming. Resistance should be light to nothing.”
Porter nodded slightly, his countenance still edging toward panic. Something else about Porter bothered him; it took another second before he remembered he was supposed to go home on midtour leave tomorrow. He still hadn’t spoken to the young Soldiers about dealing with a potential divorce before he left.
“Lieutenant Kovalenko and I will lead the first squad to the first target house.” He pulled out a clipboard with an overhead photo of two houses linked by a hard-pack road; both homes had small plots of farmland next to them, nothing but parched earth when the photos were taken. “Captain Ritter and Sergeant First Class Young will assault this house here”—he pointed to the smaller house, the one closer to the river, with the tip of his pen—“in case the source was a bit off in his location. This is a smash and grab. No more than twenty minutes of boots on the ground,” he said.
“How do we know which one’s a Saudi? It’s not like we can check ID, right?” Sergeant Greely asked.
“Accent,” Ritter said. “A Saudi will stick out like a cowboy trying to blend into South Boston.” He spoke to the interpreter, Jasim, in Arabic. “Jasim knows the accent too. I’ll screen whoever you find at the big house once we finish with my target just to be sure.”
“The Saudi will sound just like Captain Ritter when he speaks Arabic,” Jasim said.
“Thanks, Jasim. If the rest of us could develop an ear for the finer inflection of Arab dialects between now and the next fifteen minutes, we’ll put that to good use,” Shelton said, his patience waning. He toyed with the idea of swapping Jasim out with a Soldier; Ritter could handle all the translation work on his own.
A distant thump-thump-thump of approaching helicopter blades put an end to that good idea. “Chaplain? Who’s the chaplain?” Shelton asked. While no one in Dragon Company was ordained, many were spiritual enough to lead prayers before missions. Those Soldiers earned the nickname of chaplain.
Sergeant Greely crossed his arms and cupped his elbows; he lowered his chin to his chest. “Lord…Lord, we have no time. Grant our mission success. Grant us your protection to return safely and grant us your blessings to find our missing brothers, who have known only your protection for far too long. Amen.”
“Move out!” Shelton yelled. The Soldiers split into two halves and lined up next to the sandbags marking their embarkation points next to the steel landing zone. Ritter didn’t move, his eyes on the sky. Shelton followed Ritter’s gaze and saw only blue sky tinged with the yellow-and-orange hue of blown dust. The sound of the approaching helicopters grew louder.
“What are you looking at?” Shelton asked.
Ritter narrowed his eyes. “I lived in Saudi Arabia for twelve years, and that is the sky before a shamaal, a dust storm. What’s the plan if air goes black?”
“This is like the drive to Baghdad in two thousand three. We get to the objective. Then everything will magically fall into place,” Shelton said. He was thankful Ritter had waited to voice these concerns privately. He also wanted to strangle him for highlighting an obvious flaw Shelton hadn’t figured out on his own.
Ritter shrugged and put his helmet on. “I’m just the intelligence guy, but I’m pretty sure hope is not a planning method.” He held out his hand, and they grasped forearms. “Let’s do this,” Ritter said as the helicopters came into view over distant palm trees.
“Stay safe,” Shelton said as they went their separate ways.
The UH-60 Black Hawk created a tsunami of blown dust as it set down, while the ensuing “brown out” cut visibility to practically zero. It kept the enemy from seeing into the cloud as well as it kept Shelton and his men from looking out. There wasn’t much cover or concealment in the flat desert, and Shelton thanked God for small favors.
Shelton swung the door open and jumped out
of the helicopter. He took three steps away from the bird and fell to the ground, his rifle pointed out and ready. Soldiers went prone on either side of him. Thirty seconds later the Black Hawk cycled power and took off, giving another generous blast of dirt into his mouth and nose. As the dust settled, he pushed his head and shoulders off the ground for a quick look.
The pilot had dropped them off too far from his target; they were a good two football fields away from the house. Ritter and his team were on target; they’d make it to their target before Shelton could reach the larger of the two houses. There was no movement from either house. He looked south to the distant cluster of homes tucked along the riverbank. A large pen filled with bleating sheep, disturbed by the passing helicopters, was the only sign of life.
“Looks clear, sir,” Kilo said as he spied through his scope.
Shelton stood up. “Follow me!” He ran toward the distant farmhouse. It was two stories of poured concrete surrounded by a seven-foot-tall mud-and-brick wall. An aluminum tank on the roof provided clean water, if it was full. Shelton kept his weapon at the ready as he trotted to the outer wall. They had the metal gate covered, a sheet of metal welded behind the bars to block the curious eyes of neighbors.
Shelton slammed into the wall, breathing hard from the run. His men were close behind. Five Soldiers fell in behind Shelton at a corner. Kovalenko and his team were nearby, just around the corner. They had two of the four walls covered, and if they didn’t move fast, their target could squirt over the other walls and make his escape.
Shelton tapped Kovalenko on the shoulder. “Take your team to the far corner. Make sure no one goes over that wall. We’ll breach and clear. Go! Go!” he said at a loud whisper.
Kovalenko needed no further instructions and ran to the opposite corner. He used a hand mirror to look around the corner and saw nothing unusual. He flashed a thumbs-up to Shelton.
“Get ready to breach.” His fire team lined up next to the gate—Shelton in the rear of the stack, the only one watching the eastern wall.