Betrayal (9 page)

R
ON
N
OLAN HAD ARRIVED
back in the compound earlier that same day, and now he and Evan Scholler sat on the steps to the chow trailer. A few minutes of natural sunlight remained in the hot August evening. Dust from the afternoon winds hung in the air, smearing it yellowish-brown.

“Dude,” Nolan said. “I’m telling you. She’s moved on. You ought to do the same.”

Evan didn’t argue with Nolan this time about whether or not he’d have another Budweiser. He’d already had three—cans this time, not bottles. He popped the top and lifted the next cold one to his lips. He wiped foam from his lips. “Was there anybody else?”

“What? You mean with her? Did I see anybody? Haven’t we been through this already? No.” Nolan took a pull from his can. “But we’re talking about a total time in her presence of about three minutes, all of it at the door to her apartment trying to get her to just take the damn letter. If there was some guy inside with her, I didn’t see him.”

“So maybe—”

But Nolan cut him off. “Maybe nothing, Evan, don’t do this to yourself. You had to see her face—great face, by the way, so I know where you’re coming from and you’ve got my sympathy—but if you’d seen her face you wouldn’t have any doubts. She didn’t want anything to do with you or that letter. You want to hear it again? She says, ‘I’m not going to read it.’ And I go, ‘You don’t have to read it, but I promised Evan I’d get you to take it from my hands. You can do that, can’t you?’ So she goes, ‘I’m just going to throw it away.’ And I go, ‘That’s your call, but I’ve got to give this to you.’ So she takes it, says thanks, and looking straight into my eyes, she rips the envelope in half.”

Evan sipped beer and blew out a breath. “Fuckin’-A.”

“Right. I agree, it’s a bitch. But, hey, the good news is you don’t have to wonder anymore.” Nolan hesitated, sipped his beer, shot a sideways glance across the steps. “I don’t know if you want to hear this, my friend, but I’ve got to tell you or you’ll never know. She put a move on me too.” Holding out a restraining hand, Nolan hurried on. “Nothing I couldn’t handle and I very reluctantly gave her a pass, but if you needed any more certainty…”

“No, that ought to cover it.”

“I hear you. But you know, give me certainty anytime. I can deal with that any day over not knowing.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Damn straight I am.”

Evan looked over at him. “She really came on to you?”

Nolan nodded, solemn. “And I didn’t get the impression it was the only time since you’ve been gone. The girl’s a stone fox, Ev. You think she’s sitting home alone nights watching TV? Come on, she’s human, life’s short, and she’s got a life back there. This isn’t rocket science. You guys broke up before you came here. It’s over. Accept it.”

Evan hung his head. He couldn’t seem to muster the strength to lift it up.

S
HIT
, N
OLAN WAS THINKING.
Maybe the guy’s not going to get over her.
That possibility hadn’t occurred to him. Nolan had told the small lie about Tara ripping up the envelope because he thought it made for a convincing story, brought the finality of Evan and Tara’s breakup a bit closer to home. But now he saw that Evan might not accept it. He might keep trying to reach her again, might find out what had gone on in Redwood City, might even manage to snag Tara back away from him.

Nolan couldn’t let that happen. He wanted Tara. He’d gotten her and he intended to keep her until he didn’t want her anymore, which might be a very long time. However, Evan’s reaction caught him off balance; now he’d simply have to adjust. Fine-tune the mission. Keep him away from her.

All was fair in warfare anyway. And the old saying was right: in love, the same thing. You needed to be willing and able to adjust to the unexpected.

Evan Scholler was stationed in a dangerous place, after all, where anything might happen to him. Nolan could tweak the odds just a bit, give Evan a little something else to deal with instead of Tara Wheatley.

He reached over and hit Evan’s arm, hard but friendly. “You know what you need, dude? You need something to take your mind off all this, that’s all.”

“And that’s always an easy call here at party central.”

“Hey, there’s things to do here. You just got to know where to look.”

“Right.”

“You doubt me?”

For an answer, Evan drank beer.

“The man doubts me.” Nolan shook his head in disbelief. “Dude,” he said. “Put your beer down. Come with me.”

Evan took a beat, then tipped his can up, emptying the contents into his mouth. When he finished, he got to his feet. “Where we goin’?”

“Smoke-check party,” Nolan said.

“What’s that?”

“Smoke-check the Muj. You’ll love it.”

T
HE SPY FOR
J
ACK
A
LLSTRONG
in the airport’s adjoining neighborhood was an educated ex–Republican Guard officer, a Sunni named Ahmad Jassim Mohammed. No one knew the exact game he was playing, and this was no doubt the way Ahmad preferred things, but the pretense was that he had accepted the new, post-Saddam status quo and wanted to work with America and its allies to help rebuild his country. He’d gotten connected to Allstrong during the July mortar attacks on the airport, when under the guise of offering his services as an interpreter, he’d instead provided five thousand dollars’ worth of information that had proved valuable in identifying several target houses in the airport’s neighboring slum that had contained large caches of weapons, mortars, and other explosives.

Though no one, least of all Jack Allstrong, ruled out the possibility that Ahmad might in fact be a spy checking out airport conditions for the insurgents, and though the consensus among Nolan and the other executives at Allstrong was that Ahmad was using the American military presence to settle vendettas with his personal enemies among his former Republican Guard colleagues, the fact remained that his information tended to be correct. When the targets he’d provided were eliminated, the mortar attacks on the airport had abruptly come to an end. That was about as far as Allstrong or Calliston needed to take it. Allstrong had paid Ahmad for similar information several times now, and counted on the intelligence he supplied to keep a step ahead of the insurgency just outside his perimeter. And so far it was working.

No one had expected today’s attack, but Ahmad had arrived at the compound in its aftermath. Now, in the sultry early night, he sat in the front seat of one of Allstrong’s convoy vehicles. Ron Nolan was driving. Evan Scholler, in black fatigues, his Kevlar vest, and with four beers in his bloodstream, stood uncomfortably manning the machine-gun platform on the vehicle’s roof. Behind him in the seats, two other black-clad Gurkha commandos checked their weapons.

The party rolled out of the main gate. Off to their right, they could sense, more than see, the slumlike contours of the mud-caked domiciles of the residents. A quarter mile or so outside of the compound, the Humvee veered suddenly right and began bouncing across the no-man’s-land that separated the airport from the homes. Nolan killed the regular beams, leaving only the car’s running lights on.

Evan squinted ahead into the night, unable to make out many details either to the sides or ahead of them. He wished he hadn’t had those beers. He wasn’t drunk, but he could feel the alcohol, and though Nolan had assured him that they faced little or no danger, just an awesome adrenaline rush, he’d also insisted that Evan wear his bulletproof vest, as all the others had done.

Evan thought he might in fact wind up needing all of his faculties, and couldn’t shake a keen awareness that his reflexes might not be there for him in a pinch. So his mouth was dry, his palms sweaty, his head light. He was alone up here, half-exposed. Behind him in the car, he heard nothing—and that didn’t help his nerves either.

What the hell was he doing?

In another minute, they’d entered the town itself. As they’d approached, Evan thought for an instant that the car might just try to crash through one of the yards, but evidently Ahmad knew where he was directing them. Suddenly they were in a street so narrow it barely fit them. It was lit only by the lights from within the houses, but the place wasn’t dead by any means. The locals were outside smoking, talking—their Humvee picked up some kids, running along beside the car, whistling, calling out for food or candy.

The foot traffic forced them to slow down. Nolan honked from time to time, never stopping, forcing his way ahead, making the populace move out of his way. Evan, sweating heavily now, kept his hands gripped tightly on the handles of his machine gun, even as he heard Nolan call up to him. “Stay cool, dude. Nothing happening here. We’re not there yet.”

They turned left, then right, then left again, now down unmarked and unremarkable streets, into more of what looked like a marketplace area, closed up for the night, with few if any pedestrians. Nolan accelerated through the space and entered another quarter of the suburb. People still milled about, but less of them, and with far fewer children. Nolan made another turn and pulled up to a stop at a large open space in front of what appeared to be a mosque. Here the foot traffic had all but disappeared. The only light or sound—television and music—came from a two-story dwelling at the next corner down on their left.

The passenger door opened and Ahmad got out of the car, closed the door gently, then leaned back in the window and said something to Nolan. Then he turned and ran, disappearing into another of the side streets. Nolan killed even the running lights next, and then immediately they were moving, only to stop again sixty yards along, after they’d passed the house Ahmad had pointed out to them.

This time the engine went quiet. The radio music from the house was louder down here, providing cover for whatever noise they made as Nolan and his two commandos opened their doors and got themselves and their weapons out into the street.

They all gathered now down under and just to the side of Evan’s position. They’d blackened their faces and hung grenades on their vests since they’d gotten into the Humvee and these two details chilled Evan, who could barely make out anything but Nolan’s teeth in the darkness. He seemed to be smiling. “I’m leaving the keys in the car,” he said to Evan, “in case you need ’em. You remember how we got here, right?” A joke, even in this setting. Nolan went right on. “If you need to, hop in the driver’s seat and get out any way you can. But this shouldn’t be long. And, hey, remember, we’re in black, but we’re the good guys, for when we come out.”

Then he illuminated the light on the helmet he wore, as did the other men. All of these were clearly well-rehearsed maneuvers. At a nod from Nolan, the men broke into a trot toward their target. In an instant, one stood on each side of the door of the house. Nolan took a position in front of the door and, without any warning or fanfare, opened fire with his submachine gun. This knocked the door open and Nolan kicked it and led his men in.

Immediately, bedlam ensued. Screams and yelling, shots and sporadic bursts of automatic weapons fire, then the three men assembling outside again—Evan thinking it was already over—when the night was split by a shattering explosion out of the lower window. And the men rushed in again, this time into pure darkness.

Evan’s knuckles tightened on the handles of his machine gun. Behind him, he heard a sound and whirled. He couldn’t make the gun turn a full one-eighty, and he suddenly realized that if anyone were to come up behind him, he had no defense. Drawing his sidearm, he ducked down for a second below the backseat and peered back behind him, but there was nothing in the street. In the house across the way, the yelling and the gunfire continued—again individual shots followed by bursts of automatic weapons. Another explosion ripped through the night, this one blowing out the upstairs windows, and then suddenly all went quiet.

A few seconds later, the three men in black fatigues appeared outside the front door again. Two of them bolted back toward the car, while the third reentered the building, then emerged on a dead run just as his two colleagues got to the car. Behind him, in the house, two nearly simultaneous explosions blew out any remaining glass in the downstairs windows and halfway knocked him to the ground, but he kept running until he, too, reached the car.

By this time, Nolan was back in the driver’s seat, breathing hard, starting the thing up. Over his shoulder, he yelled up at Evan. “That was the place all right. That Ahmad is okay. Must have been a dozen Muj in there, dude, maybe two hundred AKs. RPGs, you name it. But nothing that a few frag grenades couldn’t cure. God, I love this work. How ’bout you? Was that fun or what? Hang on, we’re rolling.”

Behind him, fire and smoke were beginning to billow out of the building’s windows. Evan couldn’t take his eyes off the spectacle. He was vaguely aware of doors opening on the street around him, people pouring out into the night, more shouts, the screams of women. Behind them now, he heard the crack of what he imagined must be gunfire, but he saw nothing distinctly enough to consider it a target.

But then they had turned the corner and were headed back through the space in front of the mosque, then the marketplace. Evan swallowed against the dryness in his throat, his stomach knotted up inside him, his knuckles burning white on the handles of his machine gun.

A
WHILE AFTER MIDNIGHT,
Evan tried to carefully and quietly navigate the three steps up to the dorm trailer. Between the news from home about Tara and his involvement in the raid, he figured he had every excuse in the world to split most of a bottle of Allstrong’s Glenfiddich with Nolan after they returned to BIAP, and now the ground was shifting pretty well under him. He was looking forward to lying down on his cot. Tomorrow he’d try to process most or all of what he’d been through tonight, the aftermath.

He and his reservists had worked it out with the Filipino cooks and clerical staff and now had a dorm section of their own, eight cots in a double-wide bedroom. When he pushed open the door, the greeting was like a surprise party without anybody yelling surprise.

Suddenly all the lights went on, and these nearly blinded him, especially in his inebriated state. Stumbling backward against the brightness, his hands up in front of his eyes, he might have tripped on the steps and fallen back out of the trailer if one of his guys, Alan Reese, hadn’t been waiting there to grab him.

As the glare faded, Evan blinked himself into some recognition. Facing him, some sitting on their cots, some standing, was his squadron. Marshawn Whitman, his sergeant and second-in-command, much to Evan’s surprise, was standing at attention and even offered a legitimate salute before he began with a formality he’d never used before. “Lieutenant,” he said, “we all need to have a talk.”

Evan tried to focus so that he only saw one Marshawn, instead of two, looming there in front of him. He put a hand out against the doorjamb to hold himself steady. His tongue, too big for his mouth in any case, could only manage the word “Now?”

“Now would be best,” Whitman said. “We need to get out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Back to our unit.”

“Our unit? How we gonna do that?”

“We don’t know, Lieutenant. But being here just isn’t right.”

Evan, stalling for time, looked over first at Reese standing next to him, then around to Levy and Jefferson and Onofrio sitting forward on their cots, identical triplets—elbows on their thighs, hands clasped in front of them—and finally to Pisoni and Koshi and Fields, who were standing with their arms crossed, leaning against the wall. Whatever this was about, these guys were a unit, all of them in it together. And from the looks of them, all of them angry.

“Guys,” Evan said, “it’s not like we got a choice. They sent us here.”

“Well, not really. They sent us up to Baghdad, then we wound up here.”

“I’m not sure I see the difference, Marsh.”

Corporal Gene Pisoni, a sandy-haired, sweet-tempered mechanic for a Honda dealership in Burlingame, and the youngest member of the squad, cleared his throat. “We could get shot at doing what we’re doing here, is the difference, sir. They shot up this base today. We’ve just been lucky out in the streets up until now.”

Next to Evan, Reese piped in. “The casualty figures posted today list a hundred and sixteen dead this last week in Baghdad alone. Our luck can’t hold much longer.”

Lance Corporal Ben Levy, a law student at Santa Clara, added to the refrain. “We’ve been here almost a month, sir. This was supposed to be a temporary assignment, wasn’t it?”

Evan still felt the room swaying under him, but part of him was sobering up. “Well, first, our luck can hold, guys, if we just stay careful. But I’m not arguing with you. This isn’t what we got sent over here for, I agree. I just don’t know what we can do about it.”

“Talk to Calliston.” Nao Koshi was Japanese-American, a software engineer who’d been pulled out of what he’d thought was the world’s best job at Google. “He assigned us here. He can assign us out.”

“We shouldn’t be doing this.” A thick-necked Caltrans employee from Half Moon Bay, Anthony Onofrio was thirty-three years old. He had two young children and a pregnant wife at home. He was perennially the saddest guy in the group, but rarely spoke up to complain. Now, though, he continued. “This really is all fucked up, sir. They’ve got to have the trucks we’re trained to fix at least down in Kuwait by now. We ought to be down there doing what we’re trained to do, not standing up behind machine guns.”

“I agree with you, Tony. You think I want to be here? But I thought you guys were happy to have regular quarters, regular meals.”

“The guys we came over with,” Marshawn said, “they’ve probably got that by now, too, wherever they are. Maybe better than we got it here. We’re all willing to risk it. Huh, guys?”

A general hum of affirmation went around the room.

“Bottom line, Ev,” Whitman continued, “is what Tony said. Us going out in these packages every day is just bullshit. We don’t want to die driving Jack Allstrong or Ron Nolan around to pick up money.”

“Nobody does, Marsh. I don’t either.”

“Well, the way it’s going now,” Whitman said, “it’s only a matter of time.”

Evan shook his head in an effort to clear it, then wiped a palm down the front of his face. “You guys are right. I’m sorry. I’ll talk to Calliston, see what I can do. At least get things moving, if I can.”

“Sooner would be better,” Pisoni said. “I got a bad feeling about this. Things over here are heating up too fast. It’s only going to get worse.”

“I’m on it, Gene,” Evan said. “Promise. First chance I get. Tomorrow, if he’s around.”

“Oh, and sir,” Whitman added. “It might be better, when you get to see Calliston, if you were sober. He’ll take the request more seriously. No offense.”

“No,” Evan said. “Of course. None taken. You guys are right.”

A
S IT TURNED OUT,
Colonel Calliston did not have a free seventeen seconds, much less fifteen minutes, that he felt obligated to devote to the problems of a reserve lieutenant whose squadron was gainfully employed doing meaningful work for one of the CPA’s major contractors. Finally, Evan took the guys’ beef to Nolan, who listened with apparent sympathy to the men’s position and promised to bring the matter up with Allstrong, who in turn would try to make a pitch to Calliston. But, like everything else in Iraq, it was going to be a time-consuming, lengthy process that might never show results anyway. Nolan suggested that, in the meanwhile, Evan’s squadron might want to write to the commander of their reserve unit, or to some of their colleagues in that unit, wherever they happened to be in the war theater.

In the few days while these discussions and negotiations were transpiring, things in Baghdad—bad enough to begin with—became substantially worse, especially for the convoys. One of the KBR convoys delivering several tons of dinars in cash from Baghdad to BIAP was ambushed just outside of the city and barely limped into the compound with one dead and four wounded. The lead vehicle’s passenger-side window was blown out, and the doors and bumpers sported dozens of bullet holes. The attack had been a coordinated effort between a suicide-vehicle-borne explosive device—an SV-BED—and insurgents firing from rooftops. The consensus was that the damage could have been much worse, but the Marines in the convoy had shot up the suicide vehicle and killed its driver before he had gotten close enough to do more significant damage.

Earlier in the week, another convoy manned by DynaCorp contract personnel had shot out the windshield of the Humvee carrying the Canadian ambassador as a passenger, when his car hadn’t responded to a warning to stay back. Luckily, in that incident, because the contractors had used rubber bullets, no one was badly hurt. But nerves were frayed everywhere, tempers short, traffic still insanely dense.

By now, most of the routes in and out of the city had been barricaded off and access to those thoroughfares was nominally under the control of the CPA and Iraqi police/military units. All vehicles had to pass at least one and often several checkpoints to be admitted to these streets. Unfortunately, the inner city was a cobweb of smaller streets that fed into the larger main roads, and access to these was much more difficult to control. A convoy like Scholler’s would be sitting in traffic downtown, essentially stationary, and a car with four Iraqis in it would suddenly appear out of one of these alleys and begin crowding the convoys in the slowly moving endless line of traffic.

Since many of these cars were in fact SV-BEDs, they, too, ignored escalation of the hand and audio signals in their efforts to get close enough to destroy the convoys they’d targeted. And of course, in these cases, the machine gunners standing through the roofs of the Humvees in the convoys had little option, if they wanted to save their own lives, but to open fire on the approaching vehicle.

Tragically, though, all too often the approaching car held innocent Arabic-speaking Iraqi civilians who simply didn’t understand the English commands to back off, or the simple Arabic commands soldiers had been taught to give to help with the confusion. Or they failed to appreciate the urgency of the hand signals. In the first months after the occupation of Baghdad, these shooting “mistakes” had come to account for ninety-seven percent of the civilian deaths in the city—far more than the deaths caused by all the insurgents, IEDs, sniper fire, and suicide bombers combined. If a car got too close to a convoy, it was going to get shot up. That was the reality.

N
OLAN,
scheduled for the rear car this Tuesday with Evan, picked right up on the bad vibe that had been riding along with Scholler’s squadron for the past few days. Now, as he walked up to the convoy, he was somewhat surprised to see Evan outside his vehicle, having some words with one of his men, Greg Fields. Tony Onofrio, another of the guys, was standing by listening, obviously uncomfortable.

“Because I say so,” Evan was saying, “that’s why.”

“That ain’t cutting it, Lieutenant. I’ve been up there three days in a row. How about we put Tony on the gun today?” Fields was obviously talking about the machine gunner’s spot, the main target popping out of the roof of their Humvee.

“Tony’s a better driver than you are, Greg, and you’re better on the gun, so that’s not happening. Mount up.”

But Fields didn’t move.

Nolan had been aware that the unit’s respect for Evan’s leadership had declined over their recreational drinking coupled with Evan’s inability to get them transferred, and now it looked as though Fields might flatly refuse his lieutenant’s direct order. So he stepped into the fray. “Hey, hey, guys. No sweat. I’ll take the gun. Greg, you hop in the back seat and chill a while.”

Nolan knew that the men might also be mad about his own role in Evan’s drinking, plus driving him all over to hell and gone, but figured that neither as a group nor individually could they resent him if he took a turn in the roof. Although this was technically forbidden.

Caught in the middle, Evan felt that he had to assert his authority. “I can’t let you do that, Ron.”

“Sure you can.” He gestured toward the machine gun. “I’m a master on that mother.”

“I’m sure you are,” Evan said, “but you’re only allowed to use a sidearm.”

Flashing the smile he used to disarm, Nolan stepped up and whispered into Evan’s face. “Dude, the other night ring a bell? That’s not your rule. That’s the recommendation for contractors. Nothing to do with you. I’m betting Fields has no objection.” He turned. “That right, son?”

The young man didn’t hesitate for an instant. “Absolutely.”

“Fields isn’t the issue,” Evan said, even as the guys from the other Humvees were moving down in their direction, wondering what the beef was about.

“I’m the issue to me, Lieutenant,” Fields said. “It ain’t right, me being up there every day. If Mr. Nolan wants a turn, I say tell him thanks and let’s roll out of here.”

Evan didn’t want this to escalate in front of his other men. Nolan was throwing him a lifeline that could save his authority and preserve some respect in front of his squad. And maybe what he said was true. Maybe it was a rule for contractors, and none of the Army’s business.

“All right,” Evan said at last, lifting a finger at Fields. “This one time, Greg.”

N
OW
E
VAN
and his very disgruntled guys were in a Baghdad neighborhood called Masbah, where Nolan was to meet up and conduct some business with a tribal chief who was a friend of Kuvan. They’d already passed the checkpoint into the wide main thoroughfare that was now choked with traffic. On either side, storefronts gave way to tall buildings. Pedestrians skirted sidewalk vendors who spilled over into the roadway on both sides of the road.

But in contrast to many of their other trips through the city, today they’d encountered quite a bit of low-level hostility. Kids who, even a week before, had run along beside the convoy begging for candy, today hung back and in a few cases pelted the cars with rocks and invective as they drove by. Older “kids,” indistinguishable in many ways from the armed and very dangerous enemy, tended to gather in small groups and watch the passage of the cars in surly silence. The large and ever-growing civilian death toll from quick-triggered convoy machine gunners—in Evan’s view, often justifiable, if tragic—was infecting the general populace. And in a tribal society such as Iraq’s, where the death of a family member must be avenged by the whole tribe, Evan felt that at any time the concentric circles of retribution might extend to them—all politics and military exigencies aside.

Riding along with Nolan on the big gun above him, Evan was more than nervous. He honestly didn’t know his duty. He hadn’t been briefed on this exact situation and had no ranking officer above him to tell him the rules. Should he have stood up to Nolan and forbade him to man the machine gun, alienating himself from his men even more? Could he just continue to let him ride up there and hope the problem would go away? But playing into all of his ruminations was the fact that since the unauthorized raid into the BIAP neighborhood, everything about Nolan had him on edge.

The more Evan reflected on it, the less defensible that attack seemed, the more like some variant of murder. Evan had been a cop long enough in civilian life that he was sensitive to the nuances of homicide, and the raid had certainly been at the very least in a dark gray area. If the house that Nolan and his Gurkhas had trashed had in fact been identified as a legitimate military target, shouldn’t it have been a military unit that took care of it? Though it was possible that the house full of AK-47s and other ordnance could have been an insurgent stronghold, Evan couldn’t shake the thought that the attack might have been more in the line of a personal reprisal—payback to one of Ahmad’s (or Kuvan’s) enemies, or even to a business competitor.