Into Darkness (22 page)

He took the last drag of his Iraqi-brand Miami cigarette, and tossed the butt into a wooden ashtray built into a chest-high wooden platform. Abu Ahmet had insisted that Ritter take the pack in thanks for the fresh carton and shared a smoke before he left.

As an intelligence source, Abu Ahmet was proving invaluable, a fact that nagged at Ritter. Running sources was its own specialty, one that hadn’t concerned Ritter while he was with Caliban. Still, the relationship between him and Abu Ahmet was simple enough: Ritter wanted something and paid Abu Ahmet when he delivered. Ritter had never imagined himself as a john and would never compare Abu Ahmet to a prostitute to his face.

What would he do about Abu Ahmet once his services were no longer needed? If they drove out Mukhtar and his al-Qaeda allies, Abu Ahmet and his well-armed and well-funded militia would remain. Given the choice, Ritter preferred the devil he didn’t know over the devil he did.

Shelton and three of his lieutenants huddled around the front of a Humvee in the motor pool. Shelton waved him over.

“Captain Ritter, we’re engaged in a teachable moment concerning Abdul Karim and Abu Five Rounds. Care to join us?” Shelton said.

“Happy to help,” Ritter said.

“Lieutenant Park, if you please,” Shelton said.

“Sir, those two pricks are going to sit at Cropper for a month or so and probably not say a goddamn word to their interrogators.” Park said. “Then they’ll cool their heels at Bucca until the war ends. We don’t get shit for intelligence from the way we do interrogations. Why don’t we keep them and do things a bit differently?” He looked at Ritter, “You’re a spy guy, sir. What could you do without anyone looking over your shoulder?”

Ritter wanted to thank the young lieutenant for throwing a grenade into the conversation, one Ritter was now obliged to jump on.

“Even though I’m an intelligence officer, I’m forbidden from running an approach outside an official interrogation facility like Cropper and Bucca. That’s something of an obstacle to getting much done out here,” Ritter said.

“What’s an ‘approach’?” Kovalenko asked.

“Questioning techniques like good cop/bad cop. Out here, I can only do direct questioning. No coercion or incentives.”

“Are you allowed to tell us what the approaches are, or is that top secret?” Lieutenant Marist asked.

“The manual with all the approaches is online. Field manual…34-54, I believe.” Ritter’s answer elicited a look of dull surprise from Marist.

“It’s online? Won’t the bad guys read it and know how to beat the interrogators?” Marist said.

“Maybe that’s why we get so little useful information out of the detention centers,” Park said.

“That’s bullshit! Why don’t we just do that waterboarding thing like everyone knows we did on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? That worked, didn’t it, sir?” Marist asked Ritter.

Ritter scrambled for some way to steer the conversation away from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Leakers—and Ritter had a good suspicion who they were—had let loose several rumored enhanced interrogation methods used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This leak had put the US government in the precarious position of lying about what had been done to “high-value” detainees, who were squirreled away to black sites for years after their capture. Categorically denying the leaks would have been easy, but all those detainees would face trial at
Guantánamo
Bay. Details would emerge during the trial, details the government couldn’t hide.

“Torture never works, does it Captain Ritter?” Shelton said. Shelton gave him a slight nod. Ritter kept his face slack, fighting the anger that blossomed in his mind. Now he knew why Shelton had called him over. Shelton wanted Ritter to parrot the official line on torture, give an outside opinion that mirrored his own, and make him look brilliant. If there was one thing Ritter hated, it was being played.

“Torture works so long as you’re asking the right questions,” Ritter said. He wanted to smile as the assembled officers looked at him as if he’d grown a second head. “If you use torture, you have to know something about the subject. What he’s done, who he knows—that sort of thing. Getting some schmuck off the street and ripping his fingernails off until he talks is worthless. There’s no way to verify his information. Ask the subject questions you know the answer to. If he lies, then he suffers. He suffers until he tells the truth and learns that the truth is his only option. After a while, you ask questions you don’t know the answer to, and you verify that information. Lying? Suffer. Truth? Comfort. Everyone breaks after enough time. At that point their minds are an open book.”

Shelton crossed his arms, his body language betraying anger that his gambit of involving Ritter in the conversation had failed. “It didn’t work at Abu Ghraib, did it? How much information did we get from naked men stacked in pyramids or threatened with dogs?”

“Amateurs, with no purpose. Pure sadism. Naturally, no intelligence of value came from that. But we did get a whole slew of new restrictions on how we interrogate people. I’ll let you decide how much that’s helped the war effort,” Ritter said.

“Sir, how do you know all this?” Park said.

Because I used a set of brass knuckles to break four ribs of a Pakistani teenager who knew the whereabouts of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s safe house in Rawalpindi. Because I held a flame to the skin of a Yemeni who knew the name of a man carrying a money belt destined for a terror cell in Jakarta. I burned a line of black skin from his fingertip to his elbow before he cracked. These were things Ritter didn’t say.

“I’m a student of history. The French dealt with these issues during the conflict in Algeria,” Ritter said.

“And the French lost that war,” Shelton added, seizing an opportunity to make his point.

“I don’t think I could ever torture someone. It’s just wrong,” Kovalenko said. Ritter was thankful for the change in topic but decided to pick the low-hanging fruit Kovalenko offered.

“Let’s go with a classic scenario. You have a terrorist in custody, a terrorist that has a nuclear bomb ready to explode in an American city and the clock is ticking. Would you stick to the manual that might work or hammer nails into his thighs until he starts talking?” Ritter asked.

“No, sir. We’re Americans, and we don’t torture,” Kovalenko said.

“How many lives is your conscience worth?”

The lieutenant didn’t answer. His eyes darted from left to right as he tried to process the scenario.

“For our purposes, it doesn’t matter. There’s only one way we handle detainees out here, and that’s the right way, the Army way. Correct, Captain Ritter?” Shelton said. Ritter felt relief as Shelton found a way to reframe the conversation. Shelton took the discussion away from the theoretical, which wasn’t going his way, and went to the practical, for which there was only one answer.

“Of course, our duties and responsibilities are clear,” Ritter said.

“If you men will excuse us…” Shelton said to his lieutenants. They returned to the headquarters building, the rocks of the motor pool ground crunching beneath their footsteps. Shelton waited until they were beyond earshot before continuing. “What’re you doing?”

“I don’t follow,” Ritter said.

“What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t stopped Nesbitt from abusing that detainee any further? A war crime. Everything you said about torture is a war crime. You just put an idea into the minds of my lieutenants that maybe, just maybe, a war crime could be acceptable.”

“You wanted a discussion, and you got one. You’re an infantry officer. You see things in stark terms of right and wrong. Black and white. I’m an intelligence officer. Everything exists in shades of gray,” Ritter said.

“No, you’re an officer in the United States Army.” Shelton pointed to those words on Ritter’s uniform. “There’s no shade of gray when it comes to duty and honor. So next time you have a chance to influence the minds of young leaders, don’t you forget that.”

“Next time you want me to spout buzzwords and missives from the Pentagon, just leave me out of the conversation,” Ritter countered.

Shelton shook his head in disbelief. “What the hell happened to you? You weren’t like this before.”

“I don’t know. Maybe too much time staring into the abyss,” Ritter said. Shelton was right; during their last stint in Iraq, these sorts of conversations had never happened. Now their roles were different. Shelton was the commander of an infantry company deep in hostile territory. Ritter wasn’t a plain, simple intelligence officer anymore. The Caliban Program had him, and Ritter didn’t know if it would ever let him go.

Shelton slapped his friend on the shoulder. “Hey, this tour is a kick in the nuts compared to last time. Stay focused, and we’ll get through it.”

“Yeah, you’re right. When are you going home for midtour leave?”

“With everything we’ve got going on? Next never,” Shelton said.

Abu Ahmet crept into the empty chicken coop with a shovel in one hand and his pistol in the other. Salim had kept over one hundred chickens in the coop; he’d killed them all during the avian flu scare from a few years ago and had had no money to replace the birds. Salim had turned to arms smuggling to make ends meet, but his big mouth had gotten the Americans on his trail, and Salim would spend the next five years at Bucca prison for possession of several RPG rounds.

Abu Ahmet walked to the southeast corner. The smell of chicken droppings was strong; someone had dug into the dirt floor before packing it solid again, aerating the soil and excavating fossilized chicken droppings. He holstered his pistol and started digging. His second shovel revealed a plastic tub buried in the dirt. He fell to his knees and pushed away the dirt.

“You need any help in there?” Theeb said from the other side of the wall.

“Just keep your eyes open,” Abu Ahmet said. He jimmied the top of the tub open, then lifted the lid completely off. He found bricks of Iraqi dinar wrapped in rubber bands next to ammunition cans of 7.62mm bullets. A yellow piece of paper on top of the ammo read, “One more case, rifles and bullets.”

Abu Ahmet rubbed his hands together, then grabbed a brick of dinar in each hand. He held more money in one hand than he could make in a year. He squeezed the money against his chest and laughed.

“Theeb! The Americans sent their Santa Claus!”

Davis flipped through the detainee-holding-area log sheet for the fifth time. The Iraqi who’d fired the mortar rounds was on the log; that was no surprise to Davis since she’d processed him the moment they returned to brigade headquarters. But the detainee she’d helped capture—Abdul Karim, the bomb maker—wasn’t in the holding area. He wasn’t in the log sheets as arriving or departing, and he wasn’t in any of the detainee databases the army used across the country.

Abdul Karim hadn’t received any medical treatment at the hospital for detainees either. She’d called that hospital so many times that the lieutenant colonel in charge had growled at her over the phone, telling her to stop calling and asking about him.

Private Rasha had said a group of military police were waiting for them when their helicopter returned to the brigade headquarters. The MPs said they’d take the detainee straight to the holding area, and that Rasha was done watching him. Rasha also said she’d never seen those MPs before, and they definitely weren’t part of the squad working for Davis at her holding area.

Davis had no choice but to make several embarrassing phone calls to the other units on Camp Victory to see if someone had accidentally picked up her detainee and taken him to the wrong jail. There was no sign of Abdul Karim anywhere.

She dreaded her final option: admitting to Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds that there was a ghost detainee. Ghost detainees weren’t unheard of. Sometimes a detainee gave a fake name after transferring from one holding area to another. The detainee’s new name was clean, and after much head scratching, whoever had held the detainee would let him or her ago with an apology and pocket change for his or her inconvenience. The army responded to the problem with several expensive and complex layers of detainee tracking that depended on multiple units across the country to use a particular communications pipeline and reporting system. Naturally, it never worked right.

She placed a copy of the brigade operations log, with the entry identifying Abdul Karim’s capture highlighted, in the folder and readied herself for what would surely be an epic meltdown by Reynolds. He could barely handle cold coffee; the loss of the one detainee who had some knowledge of the missing Soldiers might cause his head to explode.

Reynolds was at his perch, watching the operations floor like a buzzard waiting for a target to present itself. Davis walked up to his desk and stood at attention. Reynolds ignored her.

She cleared her throat. “Sir, we have a situation with a detainee,” she said.

Reynolds swiveled his chair around to face her. He said nothing.

“The detainee Dragon Company got after the medical visit, an Abdul Karim.”

Reynolds stared right through her, seemingly oblivious.

Davis had seen this look before when one of the battalion liaison officers had reported a lost rifle. Reynolds had chewed the liaison officer out at full volume for ten minutes. It was bad enough to be the messenger of bad news; as the officer in charge of the detainee population, blame for the ghost detainee would be hers. “He isn’t in our system. There’s no record of him arriving at our holding area, and I can’t find him anywhere else—at Victory base or the detainee hospital in the Green Zone.”

Reynolds’s jaw worked from side to side as he stood up. His nostrils flared as he took in a deep breath.

“Attention in the TOC!” Colonel Townsend said as he stormed into the Tactical Operations Center. Reynolds brandished a finger at Davis before turning to the brigade commander.

The room was silent as Townsend made his way to the map board. He unsheathed his pointer and snapped it against a place on the map on the west bank of the Euphrates River, a place where the brigade had no presence, a place no American had been to since the war began.

“We have a time-sensitive target. Nothing else in the brigade matters more than getting boots on this piece of ground in the next few hours,” he said.

Davis looked over at Major Hibou, who was mentoring Davis’s replacement as the drone platoon leader. He looked at her and shrugged. Wonderful, she thought. Operations is driving the intelligence, just like the mess at the power plant. A civilian man with the stature of a linebacker and an impressive beard tapped Hibou on the shoulder, then led him out of the room.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Townsend said as he leveled his pointer at a warrant officer, who had pilot wings on his uniform.

Carlos watched as a delayed panic set in to the TOC. The pregnant seconds between Colonel Townsend’s instructions and the inevitably frantic activity was akin to the instant after someone slams a finger in a car door; it doesn’t hurt at first, but the victim knows he or she is about to feel something horrible.

This was all wrong. While he respected the Soldiers in the unit, he’d started off as a knuckle-dragging grunt in the Gulf War; they were amateurs—rangers, Green Berets, Delta Force, or any other type and color of a Special Forces unit in Iraq should execute a mission like this. There was a team on standby just up the road at his compound, and they could be airborne for this target within an hour. Yet here he was, waiting for this line unit to shift into gear.

It had taken nine hours for him and Mike to break the bomb maker some lieutenant had found behind a closet. Carlos saw the lieutenant huddled around the ISR desk, pointing at a screen that showed the blue icons of the unit’s drones. The white lines showed their trails now reorienting west to the Euphrates. Shannon asked him to keep an eye on her, as her relationship with Ritter could complicate matters. The lieutenant was easy on the eyes, he had to admit.

Shannon. He still didn’t understand that woman despite their years together. She was the one who wanted Ritter’s unit to hop across the river and see if the bomb maker’s confessions were true. She was the one who’d vetoed Special Forces hitting the target or even allowing them to participate. At least the gung-ho Colonel Townsend was eager and willing.

Davis took a sheet of paper from a printer along the wall a few yards from Carlos; her gaze lingered on him as she took the paper back to the ISR station.

Carlos knew he stood out in his civilian clothes and beard. If anyone asked, he’d identify himself as a liaison officer and stonewall from there. He was just here to alert Shannon if this raid turned up anything of value.

Davis’s pace quickened as she kept reading. She breezed right past Major Hibou, who stopped her before she could make it to Townsend.

Hibou and Davis pulled away from the scrum and spoke to each other near the copy machine. Carlos took a few nonchalant steps closer.

“Sir, if this is right, then we’ll have black air in a couple more hours,” Davis said. The words
black air
raised the hair on the back of his neck; bad weather was the Achilles’ heel of any air-assault operation.

“
If
being the operative word, Lieutenant. There’s enough of a buffer for them to get in and get out.”

“But if something goes wrong—”

“Nothing will go wrong. We don’t need to show this to the commander. His mind is made up.” Hibou took the paper from Davis and folded it before sticking it in his pocket. With the conversation ended, he went back to the floor.

The longer this went on, the less Carlos liked it.

Nesbitt stuffed a backpack with Pop-Tarts and unwanted MRE packets of crackers and fruit bars. Thomas picked the last ramen packet from a cardboard box and put it into his assault pack, which was full to bursting with processed carbohydrates.

“You think this is enough?” Nesbitt asked.

“Man, I don’t even know where the hell we’re going or what the hell we’re doing,” Thomas said, struggling to close the zipper on his pack.

“Nesbitt! Get your ass back out here!” someone yelled from beyond the confines of the mess hall. Nesbitt cursed under his breath and ran out of the building. Thomas was right behind him.

“Gather round and take a knee, all of you,” Shelton said to the two dozen Soldiers and one Iraqi interpreter at the edge of the helicopter pad. They gravitated toward their commander and bunched together as best they could. Shelton looked over his men, their faces bright against their fingertip-to-toe-tip covering of digital-patterned camouflage. Apprehension danced behind their eyes; only Ritter seemed nonplussed by the sudden mission.

“Men, we have a target, a target who probably knows where our missing brothers are being held.” He sauntered across the line his men made, sure to make eye contact with each one as he spoke. He prayed this would convey some confidence and determination, because the details of this mission would rob their confidence.

“There’s a farmhouse in a piece-of-shit village called Owesat. Owesat is on the other side of the Euphrates River. We are going to air assault to the target, find a Saudi Arabian that has a connection to the mastermind behind the kidnapping, and get the hell out of Dodge before
hajji
can do anything about it.” He looked over his men as he spoke, on the lookout for fear.

Porter raised his hand; his armor had a multitude of pressure bandages, medical tape, and a set of surgeon’s sheers hooked to its front. “Sir, why don’t we bring the rest of the company?” He had the look of a man told that he’d have the honor of charging a machine gun nest.

“Because brigade can shit us two Black Hawks and only two Black Hawks. The target house is some sort of al-Qaeda R and R area, and they have no idea we’re coming. Resistance should be light to nothing.”

Porter nodded slightly, his countenance still edging toward panic. Something else about Porter bothered him; it took another second before he remembered he was supposed to go home on midtour leave tomorrow. He still hadn’t spoken to the young Soldiers about dealing with a potential divorce before he left.

“Lieutenant Kovalenko and I will lead the first squad to the first target house.” He pulled out a clipboard with an overhead photo of two houses linked by a hard-pack road; both homes had small plots of farmland next to them, nothing but parched earth when the photos were taken. “Captain Ritter and Sergeant First Class Young will assault this house here”—he pointed to the smaller house, the one closer to the river, with the tip of his pen—“in case the source was a bit off in his location. This is a smash and grab. No more than twenty minutes of boots on the ground,” he said.

“How do we know which one’s a Saudi? It’s not like we can check ID, right?” Sergeant Greely asked.

“Accent,” Ritter said. “A Saudi will stick out like a cowboy trying to blend into South Boston.” He spoke to the interpreter, Jasim, in Arabic. “Jasim knows the accent too. I’ll screen whoever you find at the big house once we finish with my target just to be sure.”

“The Saudi will sound just like Captain Ritter when he speaks Arabic,” Jasim said.

“Thanks, Jasim. If the rest of us could develop an ear for the finer inflection of Arab dialects between now and the next fifteen minutes, we’ll put that to good use,” Shelton said, his patience waning. He toyed with the idea of swapping Jasim out with a Soldier; Ritter could handle all the translation work on his own.

A distant
thump
-
thump
-
thump
of approaching helicopter blades put an end to that good idea. “Chaplain? Who’s the chaplain?” Shelton asked. While no one in Dragon Company was ordained, many were spiritual enough to lead prayers before missions. Those Soldiers earned the nickname of chaplain.

Sergeant Greely crossed his arms and cupped his elbows; he lowered his chin to his chest. “Lord…Lord, we have no time. Grant our mission success. Grant us your protection to return safely and grant us your blessings to find our missing brothers, who have known only your protection for far too long. Amen.”

“Move out!” Shelton yelled. The Soldiers split into two halves and lined up next to the sandbags marking their embarkation points next to the steel landing zone. Ritter didn’t move, his eyes on the sky. Shelton followed Ritter’s gaze and saw only blue sky tinged with the yellow-and-orange hue of blown dust. The sound of the approaching helicopters grew louder.

“What are you looking at?” Shelton asked.

Ritter narrowed his eyes. “I lived in Saudi Arabia for twelve years, and that is the sky before a
shamaal
, a dust storm. What’s the plan if air goes black?”

“This is like the drive to Baghdad in two thousand three. We get to the objective. Then everything will magically fall into place,” Shelton said. He was thankful Ritter had waited to voice these concerns privately. He also wanted to strangle him for highlighting an obvious flaw Shelton hadn’t figured out on his own.

Ritter shrugged and put his helmet on. “I’m just the intelligence guy, but I’m pretty sure hope is not a planning method.” He held out his hand, and they grasped forearms. “Let’s do this,” Ritter said as the helicopters came into view over distant palm trees.

“Stay safe,” Shelton said as they went their separate ways.

The UH-60 Black Hawk created a tsunami of blown dust as it set down, while the ensuing “brown out” cut visibility to practically zero. It kept the enemy from seeing into the cloud as well as it kept Shelton and his men from looking out. There wasn’t much cover or concealment in the flat desert, and Shelton thanked God for small favors.