by David Abrams
We get a good look at the man. He’s wearing a pair of khaki slacks, thin and shiny at the knees, and a shirt covered with a map of stains and smudges. The clothes hang loose on him and ripple in the breeze, even though there isn’t a breath of wind on the street. His tiny eyes move back and forth among the five of us fanned out in front of him on the street. “We’re cool, right?”
“No,” Drew says. “We are not the fuck cool at all.”
Arrow shouts more Arabic phrases at him, but Rat Face just smiles. “No need, dude. English is good with me. But yes,” he says to our rifle barrels. “I am getting down. Okay? Okay, okay?” He flattens against the pavement and we’re all like: What the hell is going on here?
Cheever emerges from the alley, and, with a cartoon tiptoe, steps cautiously around the man and the box he’s set on the ground. All the time Cheever’s saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I couldn’t hold it any longer. I was just going to be a second, and then this guy showed up.”
Arrow looks from his rifle sight to Cheever’s crotch, then quickly away again, like his eyes got singed. “For God’s sake, Cheeve.”
Cheever glances down. “Oh, shit.” He tucks himself back in.
“Now what?” Drew says. “Arrow, what’s our next move?”
Park, the quiet one, speaks up. “I don’t like this.” He alone, out of the whole group, is turned away from the man spread-eagled on the ground and is swiveling 180s, pulling security for the rest of us dickheads who are standing around with our thumbs up our asses. Park thinks this might be some kind of trap. “None of this feels right,” he says.
“I’m with Park on this one,” Drew says. “We need to walk away from this.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Fish’s voice is a screech. “This guy comes at us with an IED and we just beat feet?”
The man, flat on the ground, says nothing—but we get the feeling he’s smiling into the dirt.
“I’m no bomb expert,” O says. “But I don’t think that’s an IED.”
“Sure looks like one to me,” Fish says.
“Besides,” Cheever chimes in, “wouldn’t he have come at us wearing a suicide vest? If that’s what he was gonna do, shouldn’t we all be dead by now? Me, especially.”
“Shut up, Cheever!” three of us yell at the same time.
“I’m just trying to be smart about this,” Cheever grumbles.
Fish lowers his weapon and walks over to Cheever and gets up in his face. “Smart? Smart is remembering to grab the PRC-119 out of the Humvee. Smart is packing moleskin in your ammo pouch so you don’t have to fuck your buddy over. Smart is thinking maybe it’d be a good idea to tell the rest of us you were stopping to take a goddamn whiz.”
O goes, “Fish—”
“I really had to go. It was only gonna be a second, and then this guy—”
“Shut up! Everyone shut the fuck up!” Arrow’s voice, high and trembly, stops our voices in our throats. “Give me a minute to think this through. Just one goddamn minute, okay?”
He walks away from us a short distance. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his vest pocket, lights one, and puts the rest back.
“I knew it,” Fish says.
Arrow stands there, back to us, his head clouded in smoke.
Half of us watch him, the rest stare at the man in the dirt at our feet, wondering who he is.
Arrow finishes his smoke, stubs it out on the front of his flak vest, then returns to us. He crouches next to the rodent-faced man. He leans down and says something—whether it’s English or Arabic, we can’t tell.
Rat Face lifts his head. His smile is gone.
“No,” he says. “You have it wrong. That is not what this is about. Besides, like he said”—he points at Cheever—“if I wanted to kill you, the police would already be here. They’d be putting you in bags. Little bags. You get me?”
“Yeah.” Arrow puts out a hand and helps the man to his feet. “I get you.”
“Arrow, what the fuck?!” Fish moves in, but O puts a hand on his chest to stop him. Fish looks down at the hand like it’s a bayonet.
“I think we need to trust him,” O says. “Arrow’s in charge.”
Fish has a couple of options here. He can sweep O’s hand off his chest and yell, “Fuck you, Olijandro!” Or he could, as Sergeant Morgan was fond of saying, go along to get along. He chooses the latter because, frankly, we all love Specialist Olijandro.
Only Park, still swiveling security, doesn’t like this. He shakes his head, doesn’t say anything. For now, he’ll go along to get along, too.
Arrow has pulled Rat Face to his feet, but he keeps a wary distance. We all do. We don’t trust that box of his. There’s a good chance we’re the dumbest motherfuckers on the face of the planet right now.
“Okay,” Arrow says. “Talk.”
Rat Face smiles again and it chills us.
31
Objective
Fifteen minutes later, we’re walking across Baghdad again—but this time, we are seven.
We’re no longer in bounding overwatch, no longer slipping from shadow to shadow. We walk single file like ducklings behind a man in khakis and a stained shirt, a tour guide who’s carrying a piece of a bomb, a rat-faced hajji who’ll do one of two things: take us to his cousin’s house or lead us into an ambush. Our money’s on the latter.
All except Arrow. He says he trusts this guy, says he has a good feeling about this, assures us this will be a peek-and-go and then we’ll be on our way to FOB Saro. He says, “This is what Rafe would do if he was here.” And that, more than anything else, convinces us to go with Arrow’s plan.
“We need to get a fix on the bomb factory’s location so we can report it to higher,” Arrow tells us.
Which is a stupid thing to say because if we have no idea where we are right now, how the hell are we gonna be able to point it out on a map when we get back to the base?
But because it’s getting late and we’re hot and thirsty and tired, we let Arrow have his way. We go along to get along. We just hope Rat Face was telling the truth a few minutes ago when he got up from his spread-eagle hug of the street.
“I know about the bombs,” he said to Arrow.
“Don’t we all, motherfucker?” Fish muttered.
The look on Arrow’s face, the way he leaned in closer to this twitchy-mouthed hajji told us all one thing: this was quickly falling into a vat of boiling, bubbling bad-luck shit.
“Bombs? What bombs?”
Arrow, Arrow, what are you doing, Arrow?
“I know where they are being made.”
“You have credible information you can give us?”
Stop, Arrow. Just stop.
“You are the leader here?”
“That’s right, yes.”
We look at each other. Mr. Large and in Charge, the Head Cheddar, King Big Balls of Baghdad.
“I know things,” the man said. “My information is good. But I think you’ll need more men, bigger guns.”
“For what?” Arrow tried to read the man’s face, to find the lie twitching through the tic of an eye, the down pull of a lip. But, like Olijandro, he thought he saw more desperation than deception. And if there was a weapons cache out there, well, that would be worth investigating, wouldn’t it? At least report it later to brigade HQ with a best-guess grid coordinate. After we make it to the memorial service, of course—if we make it to the memorial service.
“Arrow, what the fuck?” Fish was impatient. “Why are we still standing here talking to this asshole?”
“Yeah, let’s go, man.” Drew also had itchy feet. “Officially, we’re not here, remember? Ghost patrol. We see nothing, we hear nothing, we just glide on past. We’re in deep enough, man.”
Arrow wasn’t listening. “What do you know?” he asked Rat Face.
“These men came into my neighborhood last week. They pushed into my cousin’s house. They hit him on head and slapped his wife. It’s no good, no good. They’re bad, bad men.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah, and so?”
“My cousin told me they’re making bombs in his living room.”
“He’s full of shit, Arrow. C’mon, let’s get out of here. Continue mission.”
Now O stepped in. “Did you report this to the IPs?”
“The police?” Rat Face spat. “They’re in on it. Their heads are full of blind eyes. My cousin doesn’t want any trouble. He told me to stay hush-hush. He said to think of his wife and son—he’s got a young boy. Good boy, too. He’ll work for the Ministry of Interior someday, that boy. Maybe he’ll be police himself. My cousin wants no trouble. He has enough trouble already—big debts and now his wife is pregnant again. Their next child is ready to come any day now. My cousin is a man of worry, always has been. He says to me: ‘Never mind, forget it, inshallah, go in peace, cousin.’ But I think he’s wrong to hide these bad men. I think these men have to go. They’re bad for my cousin, bad for his wife and son and the almost child, bad for the neighborhood, bad for Iraq.” Rat Face looked at us, sweeping his eyes in a half circle. “When I saw you three blocks back, I thought you could help. So I followed you.”
“And you just happened to have a piece of a bomb with you?” Fish said.
“This?” Rat Face laughed. “This is something I pulled out of a trash can to get your attention.” He tossed the box away. It fell to the sidewalk with a metal chuckle. “But when I say I want these men out of our neighborhood, I have all the sincerity in my heart. Allah strike me dead if I lie to you.”
Rat Face’s eyes glittered with what might be tears. This dude was sincere—he wanted these al-Qaeda or mujahedeen or whoever they were taken care of. Eliminated. Tossed in Abu Ghraib and clapped in leg irons. A line from Star Wars ran through Arrow’s mind: Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi … You’re my only hope.
Arrow took a shaky breath. He had two options here: he could follow the man back to this supposed cousin’s house, leading his squad into the almost-certain death of an ambush, or he could follow this man back to his cousin’s house, find a really big motherfucking weapons cache, and become a hero for two days around brigade headquarters.
Arrow licked the dust off his lips, and chose door number two.
He picked up the metal box, looked it over, then smiled and handed it back to the man.
“Looks like this is a piece of credible evidence. We should hang on to it.”
And so, ten minutes later, we’re walking across Baghdad, a fourteen-legged beetle now. We’re less sure of ourselves—and even less certain we’ll make it to the memorial service on time. The plan has gone to hell. And all because Cheever stopped to take a piss in an alley.
We do a duckling waddle behind Rat Face. We’re going along to get along.
As we walk, our new friend pulls a scarf over the lower half of his face and keeps his eyes downcast when we pass knots of men on the sidewalks. The other men stare at Arrow and the veiled Iraqi, interrupting their conversations until the Americans have passed. Rat Face doesn’t speak again until we get near his cousin’s house, about five blocks from the edge of the business district.
We stop on the corner, crouch out of sight, and assess the situation. We’re across the street from a house isolated at the rear of a dusty yard. To one side of the house, there’s a rusted barrel used to burn garbage. A stream of smoke rises from the top of the barrel. Last night’s trash. To the rear of the house, there’s an abandoned warehouse, its windows blasted out by bombs long ago. Some glass, grayed by dust, remains here and there, like fangs in a decayed mouth. A goat tied to a stake in the yard noses the dirt, searching for a blade of grass. To the right of the house, there’s a van with Arabic letters scribbled on the side panels and a big metal sculpture of a daisy bolted to its roof—a flower delivery van, we’re guessing. Beyond the van, the ground slopes away to an empty field. A freshly washed sedan is parked along the street, looking completely out of place. To the left, behind a wall, there’s another house that was once something magnificent by middle-class Baghdad standards. Not exactly Beverly Hills, but not Detroit, either—some happy middle ground for a family who’d gotten along okay with the Hussein dictatorship. But that was before 2003; now, the entire back of the house is slumped into a rubble of brick and gnarled metal. Bodies, burned and twisted in agony, might still be under there, forgotten in the panic of our blitzkrieg. Birds fly in and out of the broken windows.
Our point is this: if there’s a place in Baghdad where you wanted to go build bombs and keep quiet and unseen, this house in front of us is it. It’s also an ideal spot for slaughtering a squad of foolhardy US soldiers out here on their own without permission. Easy to make them disappear without a ripple on the war’s surface.
Rat Face is, against all expectation, crouched with us. We figured he’d ditch the scene as soon as he got us walking toward the ambush. The fact he’s still with us sets our minds at ease. A little.
We look at Arrow, Mr. Man with the Plan. Things have changed now. From the expression on his face, it’s pretty obvious this will be no peek-and-go. He means to follow through.
Drew goes, “Goddammit, Arrow.”
Arrow shrugs and says nothing. He scans the layout of the yard and the house.
O goes, “Arrow, man. Let’s stop and think this through a minute.”
“We’re here,” Arrow says. “We’re in the moment. That moment could come and go. These guys could get spooked and hightail it out of here before we can get back to report it.”
“So what?” Drew says.
Still in his crouch, Arrow turns to him, gravel crunching beneath his boots as he swivels. “Drew,” he says. “Don’t you want to do one good thing before we leave this place? Think of all the shit patrols we’ve been on in the last six months. You really want to go back to the States with nothing to show for this deployment but handing out soccer balls to kids and pulling security at some meet and greets with the sheiks?”
“I just want to get back alive, man. This little sideshow of yours could screw up those odds.”
“Goddammit, Arrow,” O says.
Arrow is adamant. “We need to do this. And do it quick.”
We look at Arrow. We look at Rat Face. We weigh our options.
The house stands quiet and shuttered, the yard empty except for the barrel and the bleating goat tied to a stake nearby.
The day is hurrying along.
Drew sighs. “Fuck it. What’s the plan?”
Arrow improvises. We’ll give him that. He’s tried to mentally map out how this will go and he’s planned accordingly. We guess he does the best he can, under the circumstances. But it’s still half-assed, even by our company’s sloppy standards.
Once we’re in place—crouched behind the wall, behind the car, behind the burn barrel—Drew gives the signal, a wink of his mirror, and Arrow nods. He turns to Rat Face. “Okay, here’s what I want you to do.” He draws a sketch in the dirt between them as he speaks. “Here we are, and here’s your cousin’s house. I have my men here, here, and here. Okay so far?”
Rat Face nods.
“When I say so, I want you to go up to the front door, knock three times, and try to get your cousin and his family out of the house. Tell them to walk over to this barrel, here, and tell them to get down behind it. That’s where they’ll be safe. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And then you get your own ass out of the way.”
“Okay, sure. I’ll try.”
“You better do more than try. You only get one chance at this.”
“Okay.” Rat Face wipes his palms across his pants.
“Now, if it’s not your cousin who answers the door, if it’s insurgents—”
Rat Face frowns.
“The bomb makers,” Arrow explains. “If they answer the door, then I want you to fall flat on the ground—like this—” Arrow smacks his palms together. “That way we’ll know whether or not it’s bad guys or your cousin, okay?”
“Okay, sure. Fall down.”
“I don’t care what y
ou do after that, just get your ass out of the way because me and my men are going in and we’re going in fast and ugly.”
“Like the movies,” says Cheever. He’s with Arrow and Rat Face across the street while the rest of the team is positioned around the yard.
“Not like the movies,” Arrow snaps. “Nothing’s ever like the movies.”
“Okay, Arrow,” Cheever grumbles. “Unwad your panties.”
“So”—Arrow looks back at Rat Face—“you got it?”
The man nods and shrugs. That can’t be good.
Arrow stares at the Iraqi. “I don’t know why I’m trusting you, but I am.”
Rat Face puts his hand over his heart. “Truly, I am not shitting you. Believe me when I tell you that house over there is full of bombs.”
Across the yard, Drew winks the mirror again, as if to say: What the fuck’s taking so long?
“Okay,” Arrow breathes. “Let’s do this.” He looks to his left and right. Street’s clear. He gives the thumbs-up to Park and Fish. They nod in return, then put their heads back to their rifles, scanning their sectors. “Okay, go.” He shoves Rat Face out onto the street.
The man composes himself, straightens his stained shirt, then walks across the yard. The goat bleats. It sounds like laughter.
At the door, he knocks three times—not as loud as Arrow would have liked, but loud enough for a voice to come from within. After a minute, the door opens and a man wearing a white dress shirt steps out. Arrow can see what looks like a smeared streak of red running off one shoulder of the shirt. Rat Face raises his left hand and says in a too-loud voice, “As-salaamu alaykum.”
The other man returns the greeting, but in a softer voice. He looks back over his red-stained shoulder into the house.
Rat Face takes the man by the arms and talks to him rapidly, urgently.
The goat bleats and tugs its head up and down against the rope binding him to the stake.
The man in the white shirt—we’re guessing it’s the cousin—shakes his head from side to side, tries to pull out of Rat Face’s grasp. Rat Face insists, his voice rising. He looks back across the yard to where Arrow is hidden, pantomiming a cry for help.