Into Darkness (2 page)

The atmosphere around the two burned-out Humvees was muted, as if the blackened shells were open caskets at a wake. Soldiers milled around the vehicles, engaged in hushed conversations. The warped and twisted metal gave off a hiss and snap like a dying campfire. Seven black plastic body bags rested on the asphalt, each zipped shut and tagged with the name of the deceased contained within.

Ritter stood next to the brigade intelligence officer, Major Hibou. They regarded the body bags, neither willing to speak about the question the seven body bags begged to ask. By all rights, there should have been nine body bags. Of the nine Soldiers on the crater over watch team, two were missing.

The search for the two Soldiers, Private First Class O’Neal and Specialist Brown, had been ongoing since Dragon Company realized their bodies were missing from the scene of the ambush. The only signs of the two men were a pair of blood trails leading toward a nearby farmhouse.

Hibou, in a blatant breach of field craft, smoked a cigarette. The major was small, a full head shorter than Ritter, his height exacerbating the social inconvenience of his smoking habit. Ritter kept a respectful distance from his supervisor, trying to avoid the menthol stench of the cigarette.

“What do you think, Ritter?” Hibou said.

Ritter pointed to the nearest Humvee, the heavily armored doors bowed out from an enormous blast. “Whatever went off in each truck wasn’t a grenade. If it was, there would be plenty of fragmentation damage to the vehicles and the bodies.” His gaze lingered on the seven bags. “The bodies would be in a lot worse shape.”

“So it was a smash and grab,” Hibou said. He dropped the cigarette and ground it beneath his heel. “The last time something like this happened was with the Black Hearts. You remember that?”

“I know of it. Soldiers raped a local girl and killed her and her family to cover it up. Iraqis from her tribe kidnapped Soldiers from the same unit and killed them in retaliation.”

“’Killed them’?” Hibou said. “You’re being generous. They cut those boys into pieces and spread them from here to Baghdad. You think something like that happened here? Maybe Dragon has a war crime in their closet, and this is the result.”

“No, sir. I know the company commander, Captain Shelton, from my last tour in Iraq. He’s a straight shooter. I don’t believe he’d cover up anything, especially not some crime that would warrant this kind of…response.” Ritter turned around and spotted Shelton farther down the road. Shelton was on the receiving end of a one-sided conversation with the brigade commander and a host of other senior officers. Snippets of Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds’s accusations and angry questions were the only things Ritter could make out from the conference.

“Is he going to do anything stupid?” Hibou asked. “The shit storm from this mess is just getting started. There will be investigations left, right, and sideways until Big Army finds someone to blame. Last thing we need is the Inspector General crawling up our ass because your boy decided to smack around the locals, trying to get a lead.”

“That’s what we’re worried about right now. Who’s going to get the blame? I know I’m new to the unit, but why aren’t we focusing on the two men who’re missing?” Ritter didn’t care that his tone was disrespectful. Two Soldiers were being held captive, and their time was running out. No Soldier ever kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents was recovered alive.

“Right…right. I’m with you,” Hibou said. “But this
looks
bad, and—like it or not—the brigade commander is very image conscious. It took thirty minutes before we confirmed the attack. It took Dragon another forty-five minutes to secure the site on account of the IEDs on the road between here and Dragon’s patrol base. We’ve got the sector on lockdown. Bomb techs got the IEDs placed on the road, and we have pictures of footprints along the blood trails. The tech will send the bombs off for fingerprints. Hopefully something will turn up. Something will turn up soon. In the meantime someone will get blamed. If I was a betting man, I’d have odds against your friend Shelton.”

Ritter heard shouts in both English and Arabic coming from the distant farmhouse. Soldiers shoved an Iraqi man against the wall of the home, all the while screaming at the man. Ritter heard the Iraqi answer—“
Ma’aluf
”—to the questions, Arabic for “I don’t know.”

“Sir, let me go stop something stupid.” Ritter left Hibou and jogged toward the farmhouse. He ran parallel to the blood trail leading away from the burned Humvees. Blood, thick and sticky on asphalt, led off the road toward a decrepit Iraqi home. The blood trail wasn’t a series of drops like Ritter would expect from walking wounded but a continuous smear the same width as a man’s waist. The dried blood formed dark-red wave crests; a stream of gore led to a desiccated puddle of black blood on a gravel driveway outside the farmhouse.

The farmer, a painfully thin man with gnarled hands, sat on his haunches. He buried his face in his hands and rocked back and forth on his heels, whining, “
Ma’aluf
” over and over again. A pair of Soldiers, exhaustion written on their faces and anger in their voices, stood over the farmer.

“Where’d they go? Fucking
hajji
.” A Soldier kicked the farmer in the shin hard enough to elicit a yelp of pain.

“That’s enough,” Ritter said. The Soldier snapped his head over to look at Ritter, his jaw clenched shut as Ritter approached. The assailant, Specialist Nesbitt by the rank and name patches on his armor, took a step away from the farmer.

“Sir, this is the guy that lives here.” Nesbitt’s voice quaked as he spoke. “We found him hiding under a haystack the next farm over. He wouldn’t be hiding if he didn’t know something. I’m going to kick him until he starts speaking English.”

“Specialist, I speak Arabic. I’ll speak with him and find out what he knows,” Ritter said.

“Sir, use your durka-durka and tell him that if he doesn’t talk, I will fuck him up! We need to find O’Neal and Brown. This guy knows something!” Nesbitt put his foot on the farmer’s shoulder and thrust his leg out, spilling the farmer into the dirt.

Ritter grabbed Nesbitt by the carry handle on the back of his armor and jerked him away from the farmer. Ritter leaned in, their helmets bumping together. “You know good cop/bad cop? You’re the bad cop, and you’re done. Go stand at the end of the wall with your battle buddy and glare at this guy while I sweet-talk him. Got it?”

The rage on Nesbitt’s face slackened as Ritter’s plan sank in. Nesbitt nodded and backed off.

Ritter waited until the two Soldiers were clear. He didn’t help the farmer back to his feet. This wasn’t how he wanted to do this, but Nesbitt and the rest of Dragon Company were operating on frayed nerves and bruised souls. Seven of their brothers were dead, and two were missing. Rational thought was not in the cards right now.

“
What’s your name?
” Ritter said in Arabic.

The farmer peeked through his hands at Ritter. “
Maruf
.
My name is Maruf
,” he said.

“
Where are they?
”

“
I don’t know! I swear on the lives of my family
—
I don’t know where they are. I was asleep, and the first explosion woke me up. I thought it was one of your missiles. Then bullets broke all my windows, and I hid under my bed
.” Maruf pointed at the shattered windows of his house, the masonry of the walls violated by bullets. “
A car or truck stopped on my driveway, and I heard yelling in English. The truck left, and I ran to my neighbors
.”

“
Did you see the Soldiers? Were they alive?
”

Maruf shrugged. “
I saw only what was under my bed.
”

“Don’t you play dumb, you little piece of shit!” Nesbitt yelled in response to Maruf’s shrug. Maruf shrank from Nesbitt’s threat. The Soldier’s tone crossed language barriers.

“
Will you detain me? If that one doesn’t kill me, then al-Qaeda will
,” Maruf said.

“
Al-Qaeda? What makes you think they’re behind this?
” Ritter said. If al-Qaeda was responsible for the kidnapping, then O’Neal and Brown were in even deeper shit, if such a thing were possible.

“
My tribe wouldn’t fuck me like this. Those al-Qaeda assholes brought your men to my doorstep
,
and look at all the trouble I’m in. Please, take me to Cropper. My family is in Syria
,
and I don’t have the money to join them. I’m a dead man if I stay here
.” Maruf looked at Ritter with sad, pathetic eyes. This was the first time Ritter had ever met an Iraqi who begged to be detained.

Someone whistled from the ambush site. Hibou waved to Ritter and pointed to a mass of Soldiers walking toward Patrol Base Dragon half a mile down the road. The brigade commander and his entourage were leaving, which by extension included Hibou and Ritter.

“
Stand up
.
Put your hands behind your back
,” Ritter told the Iraqi as he pulled a plastic zip tie from his body armor. Maruf didn’t struggle as Ritter bound his hands.

“
Thank you, thank you
,” Maruf said as they followed the blood trail back to the road.

Southwest of Baghdad, the Euphrates River was an ancient barrier between the desert and civilized Iraq. To the west, sand dunes and wind-blasted earth stretched toward the Red Sea, which was populated only by the occasional Bedouin caravan. Millennia of irrigation canals had bled the river of its silt-laden water to feed wheat, corn, and fish farms. The setting sun kept the humidity high and miserable along the banks.

Sweat dribbled down Second Lieutenant Kovalenko’s face as he shifted in the dirt. It was damn stupid to be out here. There was no civilian movement on the roads, and most had chosen to stay inside once word had gotten out about the kidnapping and subsequent American full-scale panic. It was wrong to call it anything else. He and his platoon had scrambled from house to house, setting up roadblocks and checking every vehicle and building they came across. He’d spread a believable lie that any civilian vehicle on the roads would be destroyed with a Hellfire missile; the constant presence of Apache and Kiowa helicopters in the air reinforced the lie. Word had spread among the populace to go home pretty damn quick and stay there.

The locals were no help at all. It was hard to get actionable intelligence from the willfully blind, deaf, and dumb. Every civilian they spoke to pinned the blame on al-Qaeda and swore they had nothing to do with the attack. Nothing new there; the Iraqis blamed everything on al-Qaeda and their coterie of foreign fighters. When Kovalenko had found bomb components and homemade explosives in a farmer’s house, it had been al-Qaeda members who put them there. Without his knowledge, naturally. What about the bastard who’d lobbed mortars into Patrol Base Dragon? Al-Qaeda. The locals kept up the al-Qaeda charade, even when every single detainee they pulled off the battlefield was a local tribesman and not some
jihadi
who’d snuck into the country from Syria.

Thirteen hours had passed since the attack. At highway speeds, Brown and O’Neal could be anywhere between Turkey and Kuwait. They could be anywhere, and he was stuck watching a strip of mud. His battalion intelligence officer had gotten a visit from the Good Idea Fairy and suggested al-Qaeda might move their prisoners across the river. So Kovalenko got the call to watch this suspected river crossing instead of shaking down the locals or having a heart-to-heart with Sheikh Majid, who lived not far from the river.

Kovalenko damned his intelligence officer and vowed to beat the hell out of him the next time he made it to battalion headquarters. It was easy for that slacker sitting in an air-conditioned building to float ideas Kovalenko had to execute.

“Movement,” came over the radio from the listening/observation post just up the river.

Word passed down the line of Soldiers; with a shiver of activity, men took a quick sip of water and rechecked their weapons. Hand signals passed through the platoon. Kovalenko’s platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Young, flashed a thumbs-up. The platoon was ready for combat.

“Three military-aged males in a motorboat. Not our guys. One has an AK,” Sergeant Morales said over the radio from the observation post. A surge of adrenaline chilled Kovalenko. If they were armed, they were hostile; at least this part of the rules of engagement was easy to understand.

The roar and subsequent purr of an outboard motor broke the monotone insect buzz. Kovalenko watched as a small boat carrying three men ran aground on the riverbank. Two men stepped from the boat. One pulled the craft into a shallow inlet next to a tree clinging to the riverbank. The other pulled a reed mat from the knee-high grass and ran it over the boat as it pulled along the tree. The third man had an AK-47 assault rifle hanging against his chest. He stepped from the boat and handed the two men AKs from the boat.

Once satisfied that the boat was hidden, the men walked along a mound of dirt separating the muddy fields. They were heading straight toward Kovalenko and his men.

Kovalenko switched his rifle from safe to burst. “Please, God, don’t let me screw this up,” he said under his breath as he rotated his rifle up from the ground. He found the lead man in his optics and floated the red aiming dot to the center of his chest. His finger squeezed the trigger to a hairbreadth of firing but stopped there. His mind erupted into questions and doubts. Was this necessary? Could they take the men prisoner without any danger?

He lessened the pressure on the trigger and drew in a breath. To his right, Channing’s radio crackled and beeped. The three Iraqis halted in their tracks; the lead man flashed his palm behind him. Without thinking, Kovalenko squeezed the trigger.

The recoil of the three-round burst stuffed his consciousness deep into his mind. He saw his target stumble and fall as the rest of his platoon opened fire. Bullets kicked up puffs of dirt along the mound, and the other men collapsed, but he could barely hear the shots. He felt like his body was a drone, his mind a distant pilot. His body lagged behind his thoughts. He nodded in response to Channing’s half-heard apologies for the radio noise.

Young rose to his feet along with a fire team of five Soldiers; they kept their weapons trained on the three Iraqis lying in the mud as they approached on line. Young kicked the nearest body, Kovalenko’s target. It was a body now, no longer a man; then he pulled the AK from his grasp. The body flopped back to the ground, like the limbs were filled with sand instead of flesh and blood. Young repeated the kick and disarmament with the other bodies, then stepped back as another Soldier searched the dead.

Kovalenko got to his feet and forced himself toward the bodies. He moved slowly against a headwind of shock and growing horror. He’d shot that man. No doubt about it—he’d been the first to fire, and that man had gone down.

The man he’d killed was in his late twenties, his lower arms perpendicular to the ground, hands flopped forward. Mouth half open in an incomplete cry. A bloody stain spread on his chest; another dark patch grew from his crotch as his dead body relinquished control of its bladder. The body seemed deflated, as if its evacuated soul had taken up space before Kovalenko’s bullets arrived.

A slap on his shoulder brought Kovalenko back to full awareness. The drone of insects and Young’s commands to his team returned to his ears. The heat inside his body armor and his dry throat were there again.

“Fuck yeah, sir! You smoked that son of a bitch center mass. That’s for Mendoza, you mother fucker.” Sergeant Greely kicked Kovalenko’s dead man in the legs. The corpse’s head shook slightly from side to side.

“Sir, we got a lookie-loo,” Staff Sergeant Kilo said as he pointed across the river at a distant figure in a white
dishdasha
, a “man dress,” as the Soldiers called them. Kilo carried an M14 sniper rifle, the classic wooden stock replaced by composite plastics. The weapon had a high-powered scope and laser pointers attached to it; it was a weapon of the Cold War reinvigorated for the Global War on Terror.

Kovalenko pulled himself together; he was still the platoon leader. He still had a job to do.

“What’s he up to?” Kovalenko squinted as he looked across the river.

Kilo raised his rifle and looked through the scope. The distant man turned and ran in response.

“He’s talking on a cell phone. Want me to take him?”

“No. No hostile intent. No good to kill him.” Kovalenko knew Kilo could make the shot, but he’d had enough death for now.

“Sir! We got something here,” Young said.

Young held up a small thumb drive, its eggshell-white case marred by a drop of bright-red blood.