by Bryce Adams
“I’m the only American in this city who speaks real Farsi. Period.”
The man finished his coffee in one big upturn of his ivory colored mug, never breaking eye contact even while tilting his head back. He put it down with a clatter that was too loud to be accidental, and said, “You’re a fucker in a white suit with a grad degree in Arabic, and you think you’re god’s gift to Baghdad because you pulled one rough tour before this.”
Ambrose couldn’t help looking down at his suit for a moment. Sure, it was white, but at this point he thought it was just a sign of practicality, since Baghdad’s climate would brutalize anyone whose fabric of choice wasn’t pale linen.
Ambrose said, “I’m not only here because of what happened in Tajikistan, Chief. I’ve tested my Arabic and Farsi at Defense Language Institute level—”
“You’re a fucker in a white suit who got transferred to Baghdad because something happened in Tajikistan that earned you a transfer with a big pay bump, and the only way to justify that bump for a kid your age was giving you the hazard pay differential that came with a posting in Baghdad. State sealed you file, so I’ve got no clue what that ‘something’ might have been.” He crossed his arms again and looked at Ambrose through his auto-tinting reading glasses. “Not that any of that matters, Hayes. The Green Zone is full of all species of thriving nitwit who don’t have the sense to wear white linen in this climate, and don’t speak a word of Arabic, let alone Farsi.”
He continued, “But they’re able to thrive here because they have someone in Washington who cares about them. You don’t need to speak Arabic if you speak Texan. So you can waltz in here, blow everyone away with your linguistic abilities, and leave nothing but a trail of burnt-feeling neocons in your wake, all of whom keep in contact with their benefactors stateside. You don’t have any benefactors, as far as I can tell. Whatever juice it took to seal your file, that’s all they owed you.”
“CIA has tried to send real people to Iraq, and so have we in State…but there are practicalities to this situation that you’re not willing to allow for,” the man trailed off. Then he waved his hands, inviting Ambrose to speak his piece the way a condemned man got to babble from the gallows.
Ambrose responded, “Chief, I’m being really practical—really fucking practical—in that thing on your desk.” He reached forward, tapping two long fingers insistently on the memo he’d written that now bore two coffee rings like war wounds. “I squeezed months of work into seven hundred words, and I’ll stand by my findings forever: the Iranians have someone important in this country, and he’s not going anywhere. He’s not doing cross-border hops to rally support from pro-Iranian Shiites or to give militants suitcases full of money. He’s Iranian military, probably with war experience in Iraq, and he’s using advanced knowledge of explosives and urban combat to kill us.”
“There isn’t one guy. There’s never just one guy. Iran is sending multiple people from their Revolutionary Guard here on short rotations to train Shiite militants up in improvised bomb making, show a bumpkin or two how to handle an AK-47. The plot might be real, but there’s no such person as your mastermind,” the man answered.
“Yes there is, and since I’m the only person in this fucking invasion who speaks good enough Arabic and Farsi to examine the shit we’ve captured, I’m the only person who gets to vote on this. He exists. I’ve collected a dozen separate documents with this man’s handwriting on them. I can prove he’s dealing with at least three different Shiite militias, including Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the dates on these documents suggest that he’s located in Sadr City for the long haul. He’s mentioned five distinct warehouses by name, and he actually gave addresses for three of them, all deep in Sadr City. If you let me brief a couple patrols on this guy, they could check out these warehouses and maybe we’d get the bastard,” Ambrose said levelly.
The chief shook his head, accentuating the zigzag vein than dominated his balding left temple. “And now he’s a colonel, requisitioning army patrols. You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, do you, Hayes?”
He stood up, and Hayes instinctively did likewise. The man said, “You’re going to stop drinking CIA agents under the table then convincing them to give up original enemy documents. You’re going to stop saying anything that suggests you speak Arabic or Farsi better than the local representatives of the Central Fucking Intelligence Agency. And you’re going to stop taking everyone’s eye off the prize by insisting that we’re all at the mercy of some cartoon mastermind of an Iranian bomb maker. Just follow your fucking job description.”
“And what is my fucking job description, Chief? Why is a senior State Department official like you passing on a lecture that was clearly scripted by some CIA asshole who’s self-conscious about his Arabic? Why does a goddamned USAID surveyor like John Carlisle deliver captured military intelligence for me to translate? Is there some kind of new hire orientation notebook that will tell me who the hell I’m working for around here? Maybe I lost it when nobody briefed me on my job description for two weeks after I landed here, and I had nothing better to do than take over an abandoned villa that probably belonged to Uday fucking Hussein!” Ambrose damn near yelled.
The man jabbed a thick thumb into his chest and growled, “You’re working for me, and who I’m working for isn’t your business. Neither is John Carlisle. Now why don’t you slink back to that villa of yours, do some solo day drinking, and translate some documents for me. The ones I’ve given you.” The man picked up his phone from his desk, looking intently at it to make it clear the meeting was over. “We’re not going to discuss this again, Hayes.”
So they didn’t.
Chapter Seven
It was early 2006. Hayes sat at the bar of the al-Rasheed hotel on the north end of the Green Zone, spending his per diem on overpriced whiskey poured over ice that the staff charged you for separately. Ever since the man with the throbbing temple had told him to slink back to his villa for some solitary day drinking, Ambrose had started getting drunk in public. In his defiance, he sat at the bar each night and tried to meet new friends. On this particular night he met Adam Malik.
Adam was a sharp featured Iraqi-American from Dearborn, Michigan. His parents had risen up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 when the senior Bush tricked Shiites and Kurds into launching a revolution following what CNN’s mongoloids had called “The Gulf War.” Like most Middle East specialists, Ambrose knew that the real “Gulf War” had been the brutal eight year struggle between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which killed a million people through Hussein’s poison gas and American-supplied weaponry between 1980 and 1988. For his part, Malik had adjusted to refugeedom well; he didn’t have an accent, he drank, unlike his parents, and his nose had a distinctive bulge where it had been broken in a good old-fashioned Detroit mugging.
Adam Malik sat down next to Ambrose, and the two poorly-shaven men spent three minutes bitching about what kind of hellhole would charge a man for ice in his drink. Finally, Ambrose reached his hand over and said, “Ambrose R. Hayes, State.”
Malik shook his hand back, revealing calluses that made Ambrose feel twice as dandified in his white linen suit. The man said, “My name’s Adam Malik. Marine corporal. I was assigned to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Arbil, then to embassy security detail here in the Green Zone, then to I don’t know.”
“Which unit is that? What are your responsibilities?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many more people around here have that job description?”
“Enough to crew a Humvee and rob some banks if we decided to go Viking on this place.”
Ambrose lit a cigarette and smiled. “Sounds tempting. Need an Arabic interpreter to threaten the tellers for you, assuming you can even find a bank in Baghdad with enough cash to rob?”
“Motherfucker, look at this face,” Malik pointed at his broken beak of a nose, “I am the Arabic interpreter around these parts.”
&n
bsp; Ambrose smiled again. He liked this guy. He said in good literary Arabic, “Sorry, I forgot that you fresh-off-the-boat types cheat and are born speaking a language it takes us white boys a decade to master.”
Malik replied in thick Iraqi Arabic that Ambrose was only beginning to understand, even a year into his appointment, “You sound like an Arab BBC announcer. Have you and your white suits ever even been out of the Green Zone, Statey?”
That struck a nerve, and Ambrose’s face darkened with maudlin frustration that the whiskey hadn’t helped. “I fucking tried,” he whispered, “Then I showed my hand too early, and now they’ll never let me out.” He took a drag off his cigarette, crushed it, then immediately lit another one. “I was a fucking idiot, and I got slapped for it.”
Malik bummed a cigarette and used Ambrose’s Halliburton-issued Zippo to light it. He squinted as a tendril of smoke went into his eye, asking, “What in the hell is out there in Baghdad that you were dying to go see? I can tell you what’s in Baghdad, man, and it’s nothing that a guy in a white suit should actively be looking for.”
Ambrose looked into his whiskey as he tumbled the glass, watching the overpriced Old Granddad swirl over ice he’d paid for separately. Ambrose had once been trusting by nature, but the Foreign Service had broken him of that habit. It took everything he had left to give the universe one more shot at disappointing him.
Ambrose said, “Heh. Alright, here’s what’s what: I’m looking for a high-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer who is some kind of elite bomb maker. He’s been in Baghdad approximately two years, and his movements correlate strongly with some of the deadliest IED types that we’ve found in-country. His particular specialty is what they’re calling ‘EFPs.’ Explosively formed projectiles. They’re inert lumps of copper or some other metal with a low melting point that damn near becomes plasma upon detonation.”
Ambrose held up two fingers like a spear, then stabbed them into the palm of his hand. He added, “The plasma goes through the undersides of vehicle armor like a spear of fire. There’s no way to defend against them. It would’ve taken a guerrilla genius to envision them in the first place.” Ambrose was getting more animated. Probably too animated for public. “I think he’s the key to it all, and I wanted someone to go get him. I even have a home address or two. All it takes is someone heading out and ringing the fucking doorbell.” Ambrose looked side-eyed at Malik, searching for some sign that he’d fucked up and blabbed yet again to an unsympathetic ear.
Malik grunted back, “No shit.”
Ambrose took a swig of whiskey and grimaced as he responded, “No shit.”
The marine corporal looked around the al-Rasheed bar, marking the people around them with his deep-set dark eyes. He turned back to Ambrose and asked, “How many other people have you told this to, when they sit down next to you and start talking about ice cubes?”
“Just you,” Ambrose replied.
Malik rose his glass in a mock toast. “Here’s to me, then.”
“Yeah, right,” Ambrose said as he crushed his cigarette only half-smoked. “Sorry for mentioning it. Go ahead and call me an idiot, I know I deserve it.”
“You’re not gonna meet a marine in Baghdad who thinks you’re an idiot.” Malik looked up and down Ambrose’s white linen suit again. “At least not when it comes to this high-ranking Iranian.”
Ambrose regarded the soldier with a blank expression. He still thought he was halfway to the end of a joke where he himself would be the punchline. “What makes you say that, Corporal?” he asked.
Malik shrugged and looked at his drink as he muttered, “You see things out in the field that never make it into Green Zone reports for assholes in white suits. When I was with the Fifteenth, we saw a lot of little fights in the wilderness.” He finished his drink with a long pull, then put it down on the bar hard. “Not everyone out there fighting is an Iraqi…and that’s not something we’re ever supposed to put in reports for our commanders.”
Ambrose ordered them two more whiskeys, sans ice this time, and moved his stool closer to Malik’s. “You’re telling me,” he looked around, aware that he’d been speaking too loudly, “You’re telling me that marines are out there fighting Iranians, and everyone knows it, and they’re just not fucking reporting it?”
“No, no. That’s not what I’m saying. There are plenty of Iraqis who hate us, and I’d bet they do ninety percent of the fighting.” Malik waved his hand while he sought the right phrase. “As for the rest, it’s not a daily occurrence or anything, but sometimes, in the aftermath of a firefight…”
“It turns out you weren’t shooting at Arabs.”
Malik nodded slowly, like he was a dying piece of animatronics. He said, “It only takes finding a couple of blonde haired, blue eyed Chechen corpses before you realize that this is a pretty crowded insurgency.”
Ambrose asked: “So that makes you think this guy could be out there? Please don’t screw with me after I just bought you a drink.”
Malik didn’t smile. He just looked Ambrose in the eye and posed a question, “For every skill, there has to be somebody who’s best at it. Why wouldn’t that include bomb making?”
“No offense,” Ambrose said between cigarette drags, “but aren’t you a bit freethinking for a marine? Don’t they beat that out of you robots?”
The corporal smiled and replied, “People think that because they don’t bother asking marines the right fucking questions. So how are you planning on catching this guy?”
“Sorcerer.” Ambrose ground out his latest cigarette with a violent stab, “For now, we call him Sorcerer. We get at him through a series of warehouses I’ve found.”
Malik responded, “Where are these warehouses, Hayes? If we’re talking Iranians that means Shiites, and Shiites mean Sadr City.”
Ambrose got a pen and a napkin from the bartender, then divided the napkin into a rough grid, five-by-five. He drew three dots on the map in disparate locations along the grid and labeled them “1,” “4,” and “17.” He explained, “These are warehouses. Sorcerer gives each one a number and an address. He also refers to ‘9’ and ‘20,’ but doesn’t give them an address so I couldn’t tell you where they are. As for the rest, they’re all deep in Sadr City, and if he’s bothering to number them, I think there are more than just these five. If he’s got a ‘17’ and a ‘20,’ that makes me think there’s a warehouse 18, 19, you get the picture. Between all of them, we’re going to find this son of a bitch, I know it.”
Malik shook his head and said under his breath, “Even if you weren’t planning on barging into a war zone, you can’t just start raiding warehouses. He’ll see the pattern and stop using them. Plus, you don’t know where the others are located.”
Ambrose lit another cigarette, then started making the pen twirl around his thumb in agitation. “I don’t think so. He mentions warehouses 9 and 20 in documents from early 2005, but he’s coy about it. Then he mentions warehouse 1 and 4, together with addresses, in September 2005. Then last December, he mentions warehouse 19, also with an address.” He used the pen to tap the dot of warehouse 19. “I think he expected us to track him, so he was cautious in the beginning. Now that Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have made Sadr City practically impregnable for Shiite militants, Sorcerer can give more direct orders, which probably also means larger shipments of weapon components from Iran. He’s getting more dangerous, not less.”
Ambrose kept going, “But you’re right, we need to start moving fast. Some of my intel is almost a year old, which means it’s a year cold.”
The marine finished his drink, then reached over and took the marked-up napkin. He folded the thing twice, then stuck it in his pocket. “I see what you’re trying to do, Statey, and it’s working. But I need to get a better sense of what you’ve got planned, before I take this thing any further. Do you have any actual maps I can look at?” Malik asked.
“That depends. Do you have any actual marines?”
Chapter Eight
Ambrose did nothing to help them prepare, other than suggest everyone grow beards to ward off cursory glances from suspicious Sadr City locals. Tesoro the Italian and Malik the Dearborn Arab had no trouble with the assignment. John Young and Emmanuel Laurence, two tall, corn-fed Midwesterners, had no such luck. Neither did Ambrose, whose rakish perpetual scruff transmogrified into dog mange once it got longer than clipper level “2” on his beard trimmer.
They’d rolled into Sadr City with the lights off around 1:45 in the morning, aware that prying eyes from dozens of windows in dilapidated, identical concrete towers shone down at them. It was a gamble, but one that all five men knew they had to take; getting into Sadr City meant running the gauntlet, and that meant sucking your balls up into your throat and diving in.
But the gauntlet wasn’t impenetrable. By Ambrose’s calculations even the Mahdi Army, the most powerful force in Sadr City, couldn’t be everywhere in the sprawling slum at once. Moreover, even if they were nearby, they wouldn’t risk pulling over every car they saw; checkpoints were bad form for a militia trying to win local hearts and minds. So he calculated there was only a fifty-fifty chance they’d be captured. Whatever the numbers, his hunch was correct, and soon they made it to the coordinates of warehouse 4 unchallenged.