Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel (24 page)

“That’s you clandestine types or the Air Force. If you’re such a hotshot with USF-I HQ as you claim, you ought to be able to order one up. But if I were you, I’d hurry. The
hajis
have been stepping up their attacks exponentially. There’s something big coming, and soon. Real soon,” he said.

The porcelain factory,
what was left of it, was a sandstone shell of a building on a big empty lot about a kilometer south of the Ramadi Barrage, the steel and concrete dam on the Euphrates Canal. There was a chicken-wire fence atop a concrete berm with gaps in it that ran all around the factory grounds. The day was hot, a touch of breeze blowing dust in from the desert.

Carrie was with Sergeant Billings, a big Montana ex–ranch hand with shoulders the size of Yosemite’s Half Dome, on the ground-floor ruins of a destroyed house across the road from the factory. The sergeant had deployed himself and one fire team of infantrymen with them, facing the factory, and the second fire team behind the concrete and chicken-wire fence on the opposite side of the factory. He had positioned his light machine gunner in an armored Humvee with another Marine as the driver, defiladed in the rubble behind their position. When the shooting started, they were to use the Humvee to block the road to prevent any attempts by the terrorists to escape.

Except where were the
mujahideen
? she wondered. If Abu Nazir and/or Abu Ubaida were in there, there should have been armed al-Qaeda insurgents swarming all over the place. But there was no one. What had gone wrong? Had it taken them too long to get here?

And yet, they were in there. They knew this because Virgil had activated software on Romeo’s cell phone that enabled them to eavesdrop on anything being said near it. The range was limited to within a meter or two of the cell phone. And what they were getting was an interrogation.

Virgil had handed Carrie an earbud connected to his laptop so she could listen in. Someone—it could have been Abu Ubaida or even Abu Nazir himself—was asking Romeo questions. Romeo’s answers were interspersed with screams.

“This woman was a CIA
sharmuta
whore?” she heard the questioner say. To Carrie, it sounded like Abu Ubaida’s voice from the video in Walid’s house.

“She never said so, but yes. She implied it,” she heard Walid say. It was his voice. She was certain of it.

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know. Aieeeee!” Walid screamed.

“What was her name?”

“Aieeeee! Please! If I knew I would tell you. I swear,” Walid babbled.

“Don’t blaspheme! What was her name?”

“Aieeeee! Please! Aieeeee! I only knew her code name. Zahaba. Please, no more. Please, brother.”

“Why gold?”

“The color of her hair. She was a blond. I only knew her code name.”

“Describe her.”

“American. Long blond hair. Eyes blue. Height about one point six five meters. Slim. Weight, perhaps fifty kilos, not more.”

“What did she want?”

“Information about you and Abu Nazir. Anything I could give her, but I told her nothing. Nothing!”

“You lie,” the questioner growled, and there was the sound of screaming. It went on for a long time. She took the earbud out. So the interrogator was Abu Ubaida. No question. “Information about you and Abu Nazir,” Romeo had said. He could only have been talking to Abu Ubaida.

“What do you think?” she asked Virgil and Warzer, both of whom were lying prone on the ground, scanning the factory across the road with binoculars.

“You’re hearing what I’m hearing. They should be there.” Virgil grimaced. “But I don’t see a damn thing. It’s wrong. There’s something wrong.”

“We took too long to get here. There should be al-Qaeda all over the place. At the least, they should have someone watching the road. There isn’t anyone,” Warzer said.

“So you both think it’s a trap?” she asked.

Virgil nodded. So did Warzer.

“Sergeant?” she asked, turning to Billings, who squirted a brown stream of chewing-tobacco spittle on the bricks in front of him.

“This is Indian country, ma’am. When you don’t see the Indians, that’s when you gotta worry,” Billings said.

“It’s unanimous,” she said, looking at them. “That’s what I think too. We call in the Predator?”

“You realize, if Romeo’s still alive in there, he’s a dead man,” Virgil put in.

Carrie thought about that. About Walid; his wife, Shada; his children, Farah and Gabir, who would be fatherless; his mother. I’m death, she thought. I bring death to everyone I touch.

“Romeo’s al-Qaeda. The bastard was dead the minute I met him,” she said.

Billings, grinning at that, motioned to PFC Williams, a skinny African-American twenty-year-old who was the radio operator. Williams handed the radio handset to Carrie and showed her where to press the button.

“This is Thelonious One. Come in, Cannonball,” she said into the handset. At her request, they were using jazz code signs.

“Cannonball here, Thelonious One,” said a crackled voice via the encrypted satellite link.

“You have a go here, Cannonball. Do you . . . ?” She looked at PFC Williams, who mouthed the word “Romeo.” Ironic, she thought. “Do you Romeo?” she said into the handset.

“Romeo that, Thelonious One. Watch yourself.”

“Will do. Out,” she said, passing the handset back to Williams and putting her arms over her head, scrunching herself down into the rocky floor as low as she could go. Next to her, she sensed the others doing the same. The seconds ticked agonizingly slowly as they waited for the attack.

This wasn’t what she’d anticipated when she’d contacted Saul from the Government Center building via the Marines’ AN/MRC satellite radio. She’d first tried his office number, but when no one picked up, she called his cell. Checking her watch, she saw it was a little after ten
A.M
. Three in the morning in Virginia. Saul picked up on the fourth ring.

“Berenson,” he said. She could hear the sleep in his voice.

“Saul, it’s me,” she said.

“Are you where I think you are?” he asked. She assumed he meant Baghdad.

“Worse,” she said, and told him her intel and what she needed, including the Predator drone authorization from the USF-I HQ, the U.S. Forces–Iraq, General Casey’s headquarters. “Can you stop you-know-who from coming here?” She meant Secretary of State Bryce.

“It might be too late. How the hell did they find out about that?”

“Remember your training story about crabs?” she asked, referring to something he’d said to their class years ago during training at the Farm, that in a closed intel environment, you had agents crawling over each other like crabs in a basket. “When that happens,” he’d told them, “a secret is harder to keep inside than diarrhea.”

“Can you stop it?” he asked. She assumed he meant the assassinations.

“Have to. Saul—Dempsey’s dead.”

For a long moment there was silence on the line. Ask me if I killed him, she thought. Ask me. Finally, he said, “What about you? How’re you doing?”

“Good. I’m good,” she lied.

“You’re a tough girl.”

“Saul, I’ve seen him. With my own eyes.”

“Alpha Uniform?” AU, Abu Ubaida. “What about the big guy?” Abu Nazir.

“Just the first. We’re close.”

“What about your Joe?”

“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” she said.

Her memory of the conversation was suddenly interrupted by a shattering explosion in the factory across the road, sending debris and smoke flying, shaking the ground under them. Seconds later, the factory was hit by a another, equally powerful explosion. Then nothing.

Her ears were ringing, the smell of explosive was all around them and when she lifted her head, all she saw for a few seconds was thick smoke and dust. Through the smoke, she could just make out that the factory across the road was almost completely gone. The roof that had still been on top of the building, the bullet-pocked, crumbling walls—all gone. Nothing was left but pieces of the fence and rubble.

Virgil was saying something but she couldn’t hear him through the ringing in her ears. He stood up and motioned to her to follow. She understood. They needed to get to the warehouse and identify the bodies. See if they could confirm who they’d killed.

After all this, God, I hope we got Abu Ubaida, at least. Abu Nazir would be a miracle. It would make all of this worthwhile, she thought as she, Virgil, Warzer and the two Marines, Sergeant Billings and PFC Williams, jogged across the road, weapons held ready to fire, all of them looking left and right to watch for any
mujahideen
.

They made their way gingerly into the smoking ruins of the factory. Fragments of concrete and porcelain and machines everywhere. Above them, no roof, only the blue sky obscured by smoke. And yet, there was somebody talking in Arabic. At first, she couldn’t make out the words. As she moved toward it, she heard the sounds of the interrogation they had been listening to on Virgil’s laptop. The interrogator’s voice and Romeo’s screams. Then Warzer shouted. They went over and she immediately understood. It was the charred, headless torso of a man; by his clothes, an Iraqi. A few feet away, they found the head perched on rubble, scorched on one side, but otherwise intact.

Romeo. In what was left of his mouth, someone had shoved the cell phone. Next to the head, a scorched Sony digital recorder still played the sounds of the interrogation.

“Contact him. Aieeeee! He’ll tell you . . . ,” Romeo’s voice cried out from the recorder.

“Of course he will. What good is that? I need you to tell me.”

“But he’s—ahhhhhh!” he moaned.

Virgil reached down and shut it off.

“
Ya Allah
,
” Warzer murmured.

Carrie’s mind was racing. Who would tell them what? This was something new. But what? She went back and touched Romeo’s body. Rigor had well set in.

Usually rigor mortis kicked in after four hours or so, but in the heat of Iraq once the sun came up, it would have sped up, she mused. Bottom line, Romeo was likely killed last night around 0200, 0300. Meanwhile, the others looked around, kicking over the twisted steel remains of machines, crunching over rubble, but there were no other bodies.

“What the hell?” Virgil said, taking off his utility cover and scratching his head.

For Carrie, looking at the jumbled debris, there could no longer be any doubt. It was a trap.

“Get out! We have to get out now! Run!” she shouted. The two Marines started back toward the road from where they had come. “No! The other way!” she shouted.

Suddenly, as if by magic,
mujahideen
fighters came up out of the ground from camouflaged holes around the factory where they had lain hidden. In buildings and ruins across the way, scores more
mujahideen
appeared, their AKMs blasting at them. Sergeant Billings and PFC Williams briefly returned fire, then turned and ran after Carrie. As they raced toward the far side, Carrie saw an RPG rocket flash by and she just had time to dive to the ground as it exploded, fragments shredding what was left of a porcelain sink.

The dinging sound of bullets ricocheting off pieces of metal and the steel support posts of a roof that was no longer there ripped through the air around them like metal wasps. She got up and ran on, running like when she was in college, conscious of the others lumbering behind her. There were bullets everywhere. It was impossible not to be hit, she thought.

A machine gun opened up somewhere behind them on the road. Thank God, she thought. The two Marines in the Humvee were firing at the
mujahideen
who were now coming into the factory after them.

Ahead, she could see one of the Marines from the other fire team in position behind the concrete and chicken-wire fence on the other side of the factory. He was waving them in as the other Marines in his fire team laid down covering fire with M4s, rifle grenades and a light machine gun. From behind she heard shouts and curses in Arabic as the
mujahideen
running into the factory were cut down by the Marines. She was beginning to think they might make it when she heard Virgil cry out from behind her.

“I’m hit!” he shouted.

CHAPTER 32

Balad Air Base, Iraq

PFC Williams saved them. He called in the Predator, which was still up there, too high to be seen or heard from the ground. As Carrie and Warzer half-carried, half-supported Virgil till they were able to roll over the concrete barrier by the Marines, Sergeant Billings giving covering fire, the Predator fired its remaining two Hellfire missiles into the buildings from which most of the
mujahideen
were shooting. The sounds of the explosions rolled toward them from across the road.

Once they had come through a jagged hole in the fence, the
mujahideen
who had come into the factory after them were caught in a withering crossfire between the Marine machine gun on the Humvee in the middle of the road and the Marines with them behind the fence.

Carrie watched as more than twenty
mujahideen
raced toward the Humvee from the ruins of the buildings on the far side of the road, only to be cut down by the light machine gun from their position. Thank God Sergeant Billings had the foresight to station his second fire team behind the factory, she thought, taking her first real breath since they’d entered the factory.

Virgil had been shot in the lower leg. The wound was bleeding profusely; it was possible an artery had been hit. Sergeant Billings used his combat knife to slice open Virgil’s pants leg and put a tourniquet above the wound, but they needed to get him medical help urgently. A few minutes later, the firing from the
mujahideen
was reduced enough to load him on a Humvee and get him across the canal to Camp Snake Pit, a fire base that was an area of open sand surrounded by sandbag walls, where they bundled Virgil into a Huey helicopter. Carrie went with him, along with one of the Marines, who had also been wounded by fragments from an RPG. There wasn’t enough room for Warzer; he would follow on the next helicopter out.

The helicopter lifted up in a clatter of sound and dust, the camp swiftly dropping far beneath them. Carrie sat next to Virgil, who was lying on a stretcher beside the wounded Marine on the floor while a Marine corpsman tended to him. Through the open doorway where a door gunner stood, she could see the sand-colored city and the V-like fork where the Euphrates River divided from the canal below. The helicopter banked and headed high over the river east toward Baghdad.

“How long till we get there?” Carrie asked the corpsman, almost shouting to be heard over the sound of the rotor, the wind from the open doorways tugging at her utility uniform and whipping a few strands of hair that had escaped from under her helmet about her face.

“Not long, ma’am. He’ll be all right,” the corpsman said, indicating Virgil. “I gave him some morphine.”

“How’re you feeling?” she asked Virgil.

“Better with the morphine.” He grimaced. “Nobody ever says how unbelievably much being shot hurts.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We knew it could be a trap.”

“Couldn’t be helped. A chance to get Abu Ubaida
and
Abu Nazir. We couldn’t pass it up. Too bad about Romeo, though. If you could’ve still run him, we might’ve gotten another shot.”

“Romeo was a double.” She frowned. “He worked against us as much as for us.” She leaned closer to him. “I think he was responsible for Dempsey.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He gave us actionable intel—and he knew there was no working cell phone service in the city. Field radios have too limited a range and al-Qaeda was besieging the Government Center. He had to figure we’d send someone back to the Green Zone. The clock started ticking from the second we parted in the teahouse.”

“So why’d they kill him?”

“I don’t know. It’s bullshit,” she said. “They shouldn’t’ve. They didn’t need it to set the trap for us. There’s something else. I’m not seeing it.”

“We left it too long. We should’ve hit the factory right after they took him there.”

“How? It was impossible to move around the city at night. And we sure as hell couldn’t have done it without the Marines. Spilled milk,” she said. “At least you’re out of it. Your family will be happy.”

“My family won’t give a shit. Not that I blame them.” He frowned. “Carlotta and I separated a couple of years ago. My daughter, Rachel, thinks I’m the worst father in the world. And she’s right. I haven’t been there for her.” He grimaced.

“You’ll have some time now. Maybe you can make it up.”

“Why? So I can drop them like a hot potato the next time a Flash Critical op comes up? They’d be crazy to let me into their lives again.” He grabbed her arm. “People like us, we’re junkies. We’re hooked on the action. Don’t let them do it to you too, Carrie. Get out while you still can. I don’t know anybody on the NCS side of the Company with a decent marriage. Why do you think everyone messes around?”

“Take it easy,” she said, patting his shoulder. “We do good. Without us, the country’s blind. Doesn’t matter how strong you are if you can’t see.”

“That’s what we tell ourselves. Listen, Carrie, you didn’t kill Dempsey,” he said.

“But I did. I really did.”

“Because of Romeo? Shit, this hurts,” Virgil said, trying to straighten his leg.

“No, Abu Ubaida. He had his suspicions about Romeo and he’s smart enough to know we’d try to send someone to Baghdad,” she said.

“It’s not all on you, Carrie. Ramadi’s a battlefield. Dempsey knew what he was getting into. Saul handpicked him for this.”

“Maybe,” she said, looking out of the open doorway on her side. Below, she could see the sun shining on the miles-wide surface of Lake Habbaniya, like a blue mirror on the desert floor. “What you said before, about everybody messing around. What about Fielding? Is that why he was with Rana? He must’ve known the risk he was running.”

“I don’t know why Fielding did—ow!” he cried as the helicopter jolted a little. “I don’t know why he did half the things he did. You still going on about that?”

“The way he died, I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Listen,” he said, tightening his grip on her arm. “This place, the whole American mission here, is about to explode into a million pieces. Focus on that. I’m out of it now. You’re the only one who can stop it.”

She nodded and sat there, holding his hand till the long runway of Balad Air Base came into view.

She accompanied Virgil
in a military ambulance to the Balad base hospital, the nearest military medical facility. Once she saw that Virgil was being taken care of, she called Saul from the head nurse’s office. It was after three in the afternoon local time, eight
A.M
. in Langley. Saul was in his car on his way to work. She told him about Virgil so he could make arrangements. As soon as Virgil was stabilized, they would take him to Ramstein AFB hospital in Germany for follow-up treatment, then back to the States.

“Are you operational?” he asked her. Virgil’s being wounded must’ve shaken him.

“Cut the crap, Saul. I’m not some weak-kneed little girl and this is an open line. What about Bravo?” B for Secretary Bryce and her trip to Baghdad. “Can you stop it?”

“Bill and David are meeting with her today.” Okay, she thought, breathing a little easier. David Estes and the DCIA, Bill Walden, himself. They were taking this seriously.

“Saul, Romeo is down.”

He didn’t respond immediately. She heard the faint sounds of a car horn honking on the line. Probably some jackass on Dolley Madison Boulevard or wherever, she thought.

“What about Tweedledum and Tweedledee?” Their respective code names for Abu Nazir and Abu Ubaida.

“No. I’m sorry,” she said. What else was there to say? It had to have hit him hard, the first time they’d ever had a shot at both of them together. “On the other matter, I’m sending an Aardwolf.” An Aardwolf was a Flash Critical report, the most critically urgent, highest-priority type of communication within the CIA. In theory, when Aardwolf came in, the director of the CIA was supposed to get it within one hour of its receipt at Langley.

“I’ll alert Beanstalk,” Saul said. If he was pissed at her failure in Ramadi, he wasn’t showing it. Beanstalk was Perry Dreyer, CIA Baghdad station chief. He had given her Dempsey and she had killed him. She wouldn’t have blamed him if Dreyer wouldn’t give her the time of day now, although if anyone had a clue about how things really were in Iraq and what she’d had to deal with in Ramadi, not the official bullshit the administration was putting out, it would be Perry. “Listen, are you sure it’s actionable?”

So Saul
was
doubting her, she thought. It was a fair question, though. She was basing her intel entirely on Romeo, who had been not only a double, but a duplicitous al-Qaeda son of a bitch. Except—she’d seen Romeo with his kids. He loved them and he had to know that if the Marines smothered them with help and money, it would get back to Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir in a New York minute. Romeo also knew that if the assassination attempts hadn’t happened within a week, she’d have known he was lying and would have acted. The intel he’d given her had to be good. The fact that they’d beheaded Romeo and killed Dempsey proved Abu Ubaida knew that Romeo had passed along actionable intel.

Sometime during the long night, before she and her team got to the porcelain factory, Romeo, tortured by Abu Ubaida, had given it up. If Romeo had been feeding her false intel, they’d have roughed him up but would have kept him alive to feed her more garbage and maybe lure her into another trap.

A slim reed, but all she had.

“It’s highly actionable. Get everything ready. I’ll be in Golf Zulu”—GZ, the Green Zone, Baghdad—“as soon as I can,” she said, and hung up.

She said good-bye to Virgil at the hospital and, using her cell phone, tried texting Warzer, hoping he had caught a helicopter ride to Camp Victory, adjacent to the Baghdad airport, and had managed to make it back to the Green Zone.

“how is v?” Warzer texted back, asking about Virgil.

“good. r u back? we shd meet,” she texted.

“im back. meet clk twr my district fajr –2.” Thank God, she thought, feeling the first sense of relief in days. Warzer had made it safely back to Baghdad.

She remembered his telling her that he and his family lived in Adhamiya, a Sunni district on the east bank of the Tigris. She would have to find out where the clock tower was, probably near a mosque or a main square. Fajr was the dawn prayer for Muslims and the minus two was a little piece of misdirection that meant plus two hours, so they would meet about eight
A.M
.

She boarded the helicopter a half hour later, munching a Subway sandwich she’d bought from a mini-mall of American fast-food stores like Subway, Burger King and Pizza Hut on base. For most of the servicemen and women living and working behind the blast walls and fortifications of the big American base, it was as if they had never left home; they had no connection to the Middle East at all.

Walking out to the helicopter, she could smell the smoke and see black columns rising from burn pits, where, someone had told her, they burned the base’s garbage. It was almost dusk, the helicopter casting a long shadow across the tarmac. Being at this bustling American base made Ramadi feel unreal, like a different universe.

The helicopter lifted off and flew low over Highway 1, south to Baghdad. Traffic on the highway was light as night approached. It was far too dangerous to be on the road after dark. As they flew over the outskirts of the city, she spotted something she hadn’t paid attention to on the ground. From the air, Baghdad was the palm tree capital of the universe, the setting sun turning the Tigris River to reddish gold.