Fobbit (5 page)

If all went well, the explosives inside the canister would detonate and, in the space of two seconds—a period Robby was able to compute and witness in time-slowed sequence but which his humans would miss if they took a lingering blink—the pentaerythritol tetranitrate would create shock waves of one million pounds per square inch, cracking open the canister at the bullet-shaped tip, which would then puncture a hole in the car’s chassis, and immediately emit a blade-thin geyser of water that would envelope the car, the driver, and the bomb in a sheath of violent, dousing liquid, thus rendering the timers, wires, batteries, and explosives inert through a patented method of “bumping and drowning.”

If all went well, the water charge would knock the Opel with a hard punch and defuse the bomb, kill the half-alive Syrian, and preserve the inert IED so analysts back at FOB Triumph could examine the method and dissect the madness of the insurgency.

All did not go well.

Lieutenant Colonel Duret joined his men in a brief, hearty cheer when the charge fountained up and the Opel lifted three feet off the ground, knocking the driver half-asunder; but then Duret’s bowels clenched when the dripping water cleared and he saw the driver move first his left arm, then his right arm. The explosion had dislodged the terrorist from where he’d been pinned beneath the dashboard. Apparently the Syrian, his skull still split and leaking at an increasingly rapid rate, was dead-set on triggering his payload. If he could find the cell phone and punch in the code, and if the wires were still attached to the three propane tanks, two 152-millimeter artillery shells, and anti-tank mines, and if the explosives were still dry enough, then Duret would be looking at a fifteen-foot crater where his tank now stood.

Duret blew out a whistle of breath. “Fuckity-fuck!” This was turning into something like those field training exercises where the scenario planners kept throwing up roadblock after roadblock in increasingly far-fetched circumstances to force commanders like Vic Duret to make rash decisions. Like this particular known-unknown situation unraveling here at Quillpen, those FTXes always made him feel like he was squeezing water between his fingers. Nothing ever stayed in his grasp long enough for him to
assess
and
act
.

Duret turned to the EOD crew. “Get that robot out there with another charge!”

The sergeants scrambled, loaded another cylinder into the robot’s outstretched arms, and jiggled the joystick. They didn’t get far before Captain Shrinkle yelped, “Sir! He’s got the phone!” and dropped to a fetal position behind his Humvee, squirting a tiny stream of urine into his sweat-soaked underwear in the process.

The broken, battered, and now drenched man in the Opel was sitting up like a nightmare Lazarus. He turned his head, smiled at the ring of soldiers, and held up his phone for all to see.

“Fuckity-fuckity-FUCK!” Duret yelled. They were the only words that came to mind as he stood there, firmly but recklessly facing the danger (unlike tinkle-drawers Shrinkle). Duret stood tall, growling at the terrorist punching the code into the keypad of his cell phone.

Lieutenant Colonel Duret was truly the last man standing because everyone else—Shrinkle, the soldiers of his company, the crowd of Iraqis, the EOD team, even the robot—was crouched behind the nearest bit of shelter from the expected blast. That’s why Lieutenant Colonel Duret was the only one to see the Syrian shake his phone in frustration and punch the numbers twice, then thrice, but coming up with the same empty results every time. The detonator was no good, there was no signal from the cell phone to ignite a spark under the homemade bomb in the backseat. The terrorist screamed a string of curses at the phone—no doubt calling it a no-good piece-of-shit hunk-of-junk from Japan—before flinging it out the window.

This drained the Syrian’s remaining reserve of energy. His head fell forward, hit the bent steering wheel, and then the upper half of his skull appeared to dislodge, sliding an inch to the right. Nothing else moved.

Duret choked on half a “fuckity.” The Local Nationals lifted themselves off the ground and began jabbering and pointing fingers at the slumped driver. Captain Shrinkle’s men bounced up and resumed their protective security posture, a few of them training weapons on the crowd to keep them at bay. Shrinkle remained curled behind the Humvee, his hands covering his head for a few more seconds before he saw everyone else was already on their feet. He stood, realized the stain at his crotch was visible, and immediately pressed himself against the side of the Humvee, hoping the piss would dry quickly.

Duret looked at the EOD team again. “All right, gentlemen. Let’s get another water charge out there. Just to be on the safe side.”

“Roger, sir,” the sergeant said and finished securing the cylinder in Robby’s arms. He nodded at the joystick-sergeant and the robot rolled forward for a second time, moving toward the Opel with a growing reluctance. The robot, like the humans behind him, was tired of this day-in, day-out bullshit. He had nerves of steel, yes, but it was tedious to be carted from one Baghdad street to the other, morning, noon, and night, always expected to go where humans refused, always the same old cautious approach, warily eyeing the suspicious package, the odd swell of fresh concrete, the dog carcass with wires protruding from each nostril, while the humans sat safe and secure behind their armor-skin Humvees, watching his progress via a computer screen. One of these days, he’d show them, he’d just up and—

The robot quit. Stopped dead in its tracks forty feet shy of the Opel.

The sergeant on the joystick jiggled it up, back, right, left. Nothing. He checked his computer screen and tapped several keys. Still no response. He swore, then looked at the other sergeant and shook his head. “Battery.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“Wish I was.”

“Godfuckingdammit.”

“Plan B?”

“Of
course,
Plan Fucking B.” The EOD sergeant would have to examine the car himself to see the extent of damage done to the homemade bomb. If he was honest with himself, he’d seen the inevitability of suiting up from the minute he arrived on the scene. Robby was all well and good but in situations like this where they faced uncertain payloads there really was no substitute for nonmechanical eyes-on. With the crowd of locals growing, simmering, and pressing ever closer to the cordon, and with CNN beaming a live signal to the mothers and fathers of America—quite possibly his own mother and father who were clutching themselves as they gaped at the TV screen back in Portland, Oregon—he had no choice but to go and defuse the situation now that his robot had stopped dead in its tracks.

The sergeant began stepping into his eighty-pound Kevlar-lined suit, zipping and cinching. Before he put on the hood, he said, “I swear, that robot is gonna be the death of me,” words he wished he could immediately pull back into his mouth. He wasn’t particularly superstitious by nature, but that was like something out of the movies.

Encased in the suit, he started moving toward the white car slowly, as if he were wading through a river of cold molasses. Inside, he had his own personal sauna, raising the morning’s 110 degrees another fifteen notches on the thermometer, slow-cooking himself to death within the protective Kevlar coating. Not that the suit would do any good if the Opel suddenly went off. He would never survive the blast of the propane-propelled artillery shells. As he liked to say, the suit just gave them something to bury him in, something to keep the body parts all in one place.

The rest of the soldiers watched the EOD sergeant walk forward, stiff as a zombie. He reached the car in slow motion and leaned forward through the window. The sergeant looked like he was kissing his wife good-bye before she drove off on a school field trip with their fourth-grade son who was bouncing in his seat and making
grrr
ing sounds for a toy dinosaur he held in his hands, the sergeant pecking his wife on the cheek, both of them laughing at how giddy their kid was to go to a museum and see a bunch of skeletons at the Flesh Eaters of the Past exhibit. Inside the Kevlar, he started to smile and drift back to the United States.

But then his eyes widened behind the breath-fogged helmet and he was windmilling away from the Opel, stumbling in panicked retreat. What he’d seen in the backseat meant the end of his world as he knew it. This was it, all aboard for Kaputsville.

A soldier on the perimeter shouted, “Watch out! Watch out!” even though he had no clue what they were supposed to watch out for—he was just reacting to the EOD guy’s sudden panic. It seemed like a good idea at the time to start shouting, “Watch out!”

The warning rippled down the line and everyone got into battle-ready position.

That’s when this movie went slow motion for Vic Duret. Later, he’d tell his executive officer his brain zoomed out for a wide-angle perspective of the scene and he could see:

• Intersection Quillpen and the three tanks askew in the road, the last of them with a white car up its ass like a half-squeezed turd

• the half-moon of shopkeepers, goatherds, and schoolchildren gathered around the accident site, pressing against the hastily erected cordon and raising a chorus of ululations, tongues flapping at the back of their throats

• the ring of Humvees facing the tanks across an empty expanse of street, a squad of soldiers keeping their M4s trained on the crowd and the Opel, alert for any funny business

• the robot frozen in the center of the tableau, a water charge cradled uselessly in its arms

• an empty plastic water bottle rolling between the robot’s legs, skipped along by the wind and moving toward the Opel while at the same time a figure stuffed inside a heavy fire suit tap-danced back as quickly as his cement-weight boots would allow

• a man—thought to be dead on three separate occasions —now incredibly, like a movie monster who refused to stay down, stirring once again in the front seat of the white car, pushing himself off the steering wheel with great effort—a sticky string of blood cobwebbing him to the dashboard—and turning himself toward the passenger side of the car, fumbling, reaching for something that might be the Koran or might be the hand grenade

• Captain Shrinkle giving himself completely to the dread and terror of close-order combat and releasing the clench on his bowels

• Duret himself standing tall but paralyzed with indecision, clarity of action unable to cut through the fog of headache

• a bullet cutting the day, splitting the air, hurtling from the barrel of an M4 and lodging just below the Syrian’s left ear, the pressure pushing upward, finally knocking loose whatever fibrous matter that had been holding the cleft halves of the man’s head together, painting the interior of the Opel with blood-brain-skull

• a tattered copy of the Koran dropping from a limp hand and hitting the blood-smeared floor.

Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret saw all of this but could not process the events. He was still trying to pull himself away from his bedroom back in Georgia and walk through the red, pulsing headache. When his paralysis finally broke, he turned and saw Sergeant Lumley lowering the M4 from his cheek.

“Good shooting, Sergeant,” he croaked. It was hardly the best thing to say in the aftermath of a Bronze Star Medal moment and he would certainly be more poetic in the citation he’d later compose back at his desk in the air-conditioned headquarters, but for now he was just grateful for Lumley’s immediate action, which saved a three-million-dollar tank, the crew members inside, the laughing-bleating-jeering hubbub of Iraqi
s,
a few dozen goats, two EOD sergeants and their robot, piss-pants Shrinkle and his men, and Vic himself. “Good shooting,” he said again, unable to hide the shake in his voice. The ice water of a headache was already fountaining from the top of his skull and dripping across the rest of his brain. With the death of the Syrian, he’d once again seen Ross ignite: Falling Burning Man.

Lumley said nothing as he flicked the selector switch on his M4 back to
safe.
He looked at his men, all of them staring gape-jawed at him, and snapped, “What the fuck you lookin’ at? Get your asses out there and disperse that crowd! And for chrissakes somebody go up there, knock on that tank, and tell them it’s all clear!”

His men moved out and when they were safely out of sight Lumley stumbled behind the nearest Humvee, put his hands on his knees, and hurled up that morning’s breakfast.

It would be a long time, years and years of therapy, before he could wipe from his mind the sight of that head erupting in a bloody geyser. He’d pulled the trigger without thinking through the consequences. He was not sorry he hadn’t hesitated but there was always that nagging, niggling doubt: maybe hajji wasn’t going for the grenade; maybe he was reaching to unbuckle the seat belt so he could come out of the car in surrender; or maybe it was just a final muscular twitch of a man who was already dead.

Probably not, but still there was that
maybe
.

Lumley gagged once more, spit a loogey of bile, then wiped his mouth. Oh, well. Didn’t matter now, right? What’s done is done. What’s dead is dead. He took a sour breath. Pull your shit together, Lumley.