Betrayal (10 page)

Now, stuck in traffic in the passenger seat on a sweltering morning in Masbah, and still hung over from the previous night’s beers, Evan tried to get his thoughts in order. He had to figure out a way to get his troops out of this assignment; he had to stop drinking every night with Nolan; he had to accept that it was over with Tara; he had to get a plan for his life when he got out of here.

He closed his eyes against the constant dull awful throbbing. In the driver’s seat, Tony Onofrio must have caught his moment of weakness, because he turned the music way up to a painful decibel level—Toby Keith’s new hit “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” This was Tony’s not-so-subtle punishment for the fact that Evan hadn’t succeeded in getting them transferred yet. The other beautiful aspect of the earsplitting volume was that Evan couldn’t acknowledge that it bothered him—to do so would be admitting to his hangover. Tony, of course, knew he had the hangover. The message was clear enough—if Evan could jeopardize all of their safety putting more priority on drinking than on getting them out of here, then Tony could play his goddamned music as loud as he fucking wanted.

But suddenly, all the cogitations became moot. They were moving along at about ten miles per hour and they had just passed a side street when Nolan slapped three times rapidly onto the hood of their vehicle. “Heads up,” he yelled down with real urgency, “bogey at ten o’clock. Ten o’clock.”

Instantly jarred alert—this was a situation Evan had been trained for—Evan hit his radio and passed the word up to the rest of his squadron. “Pisoni! Gene, any way to speed up?” Then he yelled at Nolan. “Hand-signals first, Ron. Back ’em off. Back ’em off!”

From the radio, he heard, “Negative, sir. We’re stuck up here.”

Nolan shouted, “Comin’ on.”

“Don’t fire! Repeat, do not fire.”

He knew that he had to see how serious the threat was before he could formulate his response. If nothing else, he needed to make sure that this encounter went by the rules of engagement, the escalated warning process. But on the other hand if it was a suicide bomber who had targeted them, it would happen quickly and he couldn’t be afraid to pull the trigger. He drew his own sidearm, the 9mm Baretta M9, and, turning half-around in his seat, stuck his head out the window. Behind them, just out of the alley and pulling out ahead of the backed-up traffic in the space behind them, was a beat-up white sedan with no license plates. The rear car in all of the convoys already sported relatively large signs, written in English and Arabic, warning following vehicles to leave at least one hundred feet of space, and experienced drivers in Baghdad tended to err on the side of caution. And yet this car had entered the roadway at about seventy-five feet and was advancing.

Looking up, Evan saw that Nolan had drawn himself up to full height and was standing with both arms extended, palms out—the classic “stay-back” signal in any language. Trying to get a better glimpse of the car behind them, Evan stuck his body out even farther. With the sun beating down on the windshield, the view inside the vehicle was generally obscured, but Evan was fairly certain that he could make out two people in the front seats. The back window on his side was down as well, and he caught a glimpse of forearm for a moment, instantly retracted.

“There’s three of ’em in there at least,” he called up to Nolan. Then, into the radio again, “Gene, can you get to the side and go around? The sidewalk, even?”

“Clogged up, sir. Negative. In fact, slowing.”

“Shit.” Evan knew that they had a megawatt flashlight in the backseat for just this situation. He pulled himself back in and told Greg Fields, behind the driver’s seat—who should have been up where Nolan was—to find it and shine it at the approaching driver’s face. It was supposed to be for nighttime use, but it might do some good during the day as well.

Digging in his duty bag on the floor at his feet, Evan pulled out the airhorn klaxon they carried for just such a moment. Amazingly enough, it seemed that even this many months into the occupation, some people—even whole families—would simply take to the streets in their cars to go shopping or run an errand. They’d get to talking or arguing and never see the warning hand signals until it was too late.

Coming out the window again, airhorn in his hand, Evan looked quickly to the roof. Nolan had gotten down out of his extended position and now his palms were gripped around the handles of the machine gun. “Hold off, Nolan! Hold off! Wait for my order!”

The car had closed to under forty feet in ten seconds, and seemed to be accelerating. Like everywhere else in the civilized world, Iraq seemed to raise drivers who abhorred a vacuum between vehicles. Even in the bright sunshine, even with the glare off the windshield, Evan could see that Fields had trained his blinding light on the driver. From his own side, he held out the airhorn and let out a blast.

The radio squawked out. “Deadlock up here, sir. Slowing down.”

Evan checked the position of the approaching car—was it, too, slowing down at last? Good, it had stopped in time, thank God. This crisis would pass. He reckoned that he had time for a quick look ahead of them. Turning, he was about to order Pisoni onto the sidewalk—the pedestrians would have to scatter and that was just too damn bad. Onofrio hit the brakes and they came to a complete stop.

All was still. Evan breathed a sigh of great relief.

And then, with a maniacal war whoop, right above him, Ron Nolan opened fire.

T
HE CAR DID NOT EXPLODE.

That alone was enough to cause Evan grave concern. That and the fact that in the seconds before Nolan had started shooting, the car had finally gotten the frantic message from the lights and airhorns and without a doubt had come to a complete halt. Only after the first hail of bullets had slammed into it had it started moving again—the dead driver’s foot letting up its pressure on the brakes?—coming on, actually faster now, with Nolan continually pouring rounds into it, until it rammed into the back of Evan’s car and shuddered to a stop.

“Don’t leave the cars unattended!” Evan tried to keep his rising panic out of his voice. “Stay at the wheel! Man your guns! Who’s riding shotgun in your car, Gene? Well, get Reese back here with us. Fields,” he yelled at his assistant driver, “out with me!”

The street had first seemed to go eerily silent, but already now as he all but fell out of the car, Evan became aware of the upswell of volume that was growing around them. Back behind them, on the sidewalk, a man was screaming, keening, and there appeared to be a form down on the sidewalk next to him—one or more of Nolan’s bullets had apparently hit a bystander as he or she was walking down the street. This was perhaps unavoidable once the shooting started, but it aggravated the situation terribly.

A man on the curb was yelling at him in English. “He was stopping! He was stopping!” Back at the shot-up sedan, Fields and Reese on the other side, Evan approached with great caution. Although the windshield was blown out and red streaks tinted the inside of the other windows, someone might still be armed and alive inside, or there might still be an unexploded bomb.

Evan came up to the passenger door, gingerly pulled it open, then spoke into the radio to Pisoni. “Gene. Get through to somebody somewhere and tell them about this. Give ’em our location and tell ’em we need support yesterday. Anything they can get to us.”

Behind him, he became aware of more shouts, randomly laced with fury. He turned his attention to the body—a woman, judging by the bloodied shreds of the
niqab
, or veil, that now stuck to what had been her face. Now she sprawled partially out of the front seat, her upper body bleeding into the street. On the other side of the car, Fields had opened the back door and stepped back in disgust and horror. “Holy shit, Ev, there’s kids back here.”

A minute later, the first of the rocks hit his Humvee.

F
OR PERHAPS TEN MINUTES,
though it seemed more like an hour, Evan tried to direct events, even through the bombardment of projectiles that the entire convoy was beginning to endure. He gave his machine gunners, including and especially Nolan, strict orders not to fire into the crowd. He hoped that the reinforcements that Pisoni had called for would arrive in something like a timely manner, and he entertained the hope that this wouldn’t escalate further, at least until the cavalry showed up.

But he couldn’t keep the crowd from closing in around the white sedan, some members of it clearly recognizing the family that Nolan had just slaughtered. As Evan and his men retreated back to their own bunched-up vehicles, they heard from Pisoni that Iraqi police units, stationed nearby, were on their way.

Meanwhile, though, some of the crowd members had laid down blankets in the street and begun the process of removing the bodies from the car. First the woman, then her husband, who’d been behind the wheel, finally the three children—by the size of them, none older than six or seven. All of them were badly bloodied, but one was apparently still breathing, and someone grabbed that child and disappeared with it into the crowd.

Nolan, still up behind his gun, now had his eyes on the street in front of them, which had cleared as the forward traffic had begun to move. “Evan,” he said, and when Scholler looked up, he pointed. “Check it out.”

Evan turned. “What?”

“We’re good to go, dude.”

“What are you talking about? We’re not going anywhere. We’ve got a multiple fatality incident here, Ron. We stay till we’re cleared.”

“Bad idea, Lieutenant. We go while we can. These people will take care of their own, but we’d best be gone by the time word gets out around here.”

“We
can’t
be gone. We’ve got to report—”

“Report? To the local cops? And then what? No, man, what we’ve got to do is get out of here now, while we can, before it gets ugly and personal.”

“Personal with us?”

“We killed ’em, Lieutenant.”

“We didn’t kill ’em, Nolan. You killed ’em.”

“So split a straw. They’re not gonna care. We’re on the same side, is all that matters. This is a clan culture, so everybody in these poor fuckers’ clan is honor bound to kill us. It’s going to get personal in about two minutes, I promise.”

Evan looked off down the street at the still-receding line of traffic that had been blocking their way all morning. Behind them, the horns of a hundred other cars urged him to drive off, clear the road, get out of the way. He didn’t know how he could in any kind of conscience leave the scene of an incident such as this one—all his police training went against it. There would have to be an investigation, photographs, testimony taken. They couldn’t just see an opportunity to get away and run from all this, could they?

From across the car, Fields said, “I think Mr. Nolan’s right, sir. We’ve got to get out of here. We get back to an FOB someplace.” Fields was picking up the jargon. An FOB was a secure troop area, or forward operating base, with Bremer walls, crew-served weapons, and security checkpoints. “We make our report out of there.”

Evan didn’t respond and instead went to his radio. “Gene,” he said, “what’s it look like for getting out of here?”

“When?”

“Right now.”

“Decent. There’s an off-road to a barricade point another quarter mile up, and I can—”

At that moment, a low hum filled the torpid air around them. Nolan yelled out, “RPG. Down!” And sixty feet from where Evan stood, the first Humvee suddenly exploded in a ball of flame, knocking him, Fields, and Reese to the pavement. Nearly deafened, Evan still registered that Nolan had come up out of his crouch and turned his machine gun to the building from which he believed the rocket-propelled grenade had been fired.

Gene Pisoni and Marshawn Whitman had just taken a direct hit that they couldn’t have survived. Across the hood of Evan’s own Humvee, Reese stood back into his view, the left half of his face awash in blood. He was trying to say something, motioning to Evan, but either he wasn’t saying any words or Evan couldn’t hear them through the deafening roar in his head. Fields, too, finally got to his feet, apparently unharmed, and pointed to the Humvee, then to the empty street yawning open before them, in an unambiguous gesture. It was past time for talking about it. They had to get out of there.

He was right. Now the second and third Humvees were open targets—possibly saved, Evan later realized, by their proximity to the white sedan or to the crowd that had initially gathered around it. But that wasn’t any part of his consideration as he pointed Reese to the second Humvee and hopped into the third one just as a spray of bullets pinged off the street in front of them all, cutting across the hood of his vehicle. Nolan wheeled and fired into the buildings again.

Onofrio had his vehicle in gear and started forward. In the second Humvee just in front of them, Reese reached the open passenger door and half jumped, half fell inside, joining Levy, Koshi, and Davy Jefferson—a twenty-four-year-old In-N-Out manager from Sunnyvale—who was stationed on the machine gun. And perhaps because of fear, or maybe an understood complicity among the locals, Evan noticed the crowd had suddenly fallen back from around them, isolating them as targets even further. Up out of the roof of the Humvee in front of them, Davy Jefferson had opened fire at some rooflines as well.

Another spray of bullets kicked at the street between the two vehicles. Over Evan’s head, Nolan fired another burst, which was followed closely by a terrifyingly close low humming vibration as another RPG somehow missed them and exploded into a storefront over on their left. Glass and stucco dust rained down over them.

Evan hit his driver’s arm and pointed to the burned-out, still smoking remains of their #1 vehicle. He still could barely hear himself, although he was yelling. “Gene and Marsh! Gene and Marsh!” Telling Onofrio he wasn’t going to leave his dead men behind to be mutilated by the mob, which was the way this scenario looked like it was starting to develop.

They pulled around next to their #2 Humvee and at Evan’s signal, he and Fields jumped out into the street again. Evan motioned to Nolan and Jefferson, on the two still-working guns, to cover them as they ran to the destroyed, still smoking #1 Humvee. Whitman’s charred and bloodied body had been blown clear out of his hole by the machine gun and now lay sprawled over the roof. Evan and Fields grabbed their fallen comrade by the arms and pulled him down, then began dragging him as fast as they could back to their vehicle.