Into Darkness (8 page)

“Safer, yes. We need to deliver the good captain right now. There are twenty vehicles ahead of us. If
hajji
wanted to pop us, he would have done it.” She clapped her gloved hands twice. “Let’s move.” A hint of irritation crept into her voice.

The driver nodded and pulled onto the shoulder. Gravel squealed and popped under the Humvee’s weight. Fine dust leaped into the air in their wake, destined to turn the hot air into an oppressive haze. Ritter stared out his window, looking for some sign of the prisoner or any sign of life in the vast complex. They passed dozens of beige-and-tan vehicles until a Soldier slipped from between the convoy and flagged them down.

They stopped as the Soldier trotted to the driver’s door, keeping their vehicle between him and any enemy who might be watching from the power plant. The Soldier yanked the driver’s door open and stuck his head in. The moon dust, in Soldier parlance, gave his face a zombie pallor. Bright eyes locked on Ritter.

“Enti tecqi arabi?” (Do you speak Arabic?) he asked. Ritter winced at his accent, but at least he was trying.

“
Na’am
” (Yes), Ritter answered as he unlatched his belt and opened his door. The air smelled of diesel and the chalky moon dust as it washed over him.

“Have a good time.” She winked at him as he left. He gave her a quick nod and slammed the armored door shut; the momentum was enough to shatter an errant finger. The Soldier, who was a head taller than Ritter, trotted around the Humvee and pointed to a distant knot of Soldiers next to a brick building.

“I’m Lieutenant Park. I’ll take you to Captain Shelton.” He slapped Ritter on the shoulder and started jogging toward the brick building. Ritter kept up, thankful that his many hours at the gym gave him the strength to haul all this gear at the pace set by Park’s annoyingly long legs. Park was easily the tallest Korean he’d ever met. Ritter’s gear undulated as they ran, the disharmony pounding his armor onto his hips and shoulders. Ritter focused on the Soldiers milling around a blue-clad form, who sat against a brick wall.

“Don’t mean to rush you, but we’ve taken a few potshots,” Park said.

The blue-clad form was an Iraqi man, his hands bound by a white zip tie, his head buried in his arms. A pair of Soldiers stood guard over him, one with an AK-47 slung over his back.

Shelton motioned to Ritter as the two approached; a half smile cracked his face as he recognized Ritter. “I’ll be damned. They let you out,” Shelton said as he led Ritter away from the detainee. They kept their backs to the wall as they spoke. Ritter fought the urge to drink water; he didn’t want to look soft in front of Shelton and his men.

“Let’s hurry up before my ride turns into a pumpkin. What have you got?” Ritter asked.

“This shit heel saw the convoy and took off running. Caught him in this building and found the AK. Someone took a shot at us when we dragged him out.”

“Nothing out of him?”

“No. The one ’terp I have is with another platoon, trying to get information from a squatter family we found living out here. They haven’t been much help.” Shelton spat and took a drag from the hose leading to his Camelbak.

“Bring him over here and let me talk to him,” Ritter said. He looked back toward Mattingly’s Humvee, idling in the same spot he’d left it.

Shelton snapped his fingers and tilted his head at Ritter. His men frog-marched the detainee in the blue tracksuit to Ritter and leaned him against the wall, pushing down on his shoulder. The detainee tried to protest; a swift kick to the back of his ankles sent him to the ground in short order. His hoary and calloused hands were too old for his youthful and thin face. He looked at Ritter with indifference.

“
Shismek?
” (Name?). The Arabic word from the American officer hit the Iraqi like a punch. He cocked his head as though Ritter were a curiosity. Ritter knelt down and grasped the Iraqi’s wrist. A softer approach might work after the hostile company of Shelton and his men.

B
OOM
!

The blast wave slammed him into the wall with the force of a runaway truck. The concussion sent a white flash across his eyes and filled his ears with a tinnitus roar.

Something bounced off the wall next to him with a wet crush. Ritter lay on the ground, his lungs refusing to work.

He pushed himself up, finally sucking in a ragged breath full of moon dust.

He was holding something; he looked down and saw the Iraqi’s severed hands and wrists, still bound by the zip tie. A sizzling hunk of metal was buried in the wall where the Iraqi’s head and shoulders should have been; boiling blood and fat filled the air with an iron stink. The remains of the Iraqi’s body swayed for a moment, then toppled over. Ritter tossed the body parts aside as he stood.

Mattingly’s upside-down Humvee lay in the blast crater; wisps of flame clung to the spinning wheels.

Ritter screamed Mattingly’s name. He kept screaming as he ran to the Humvee, but all he could hear was the ringing in his ears. The sledgehammer blast of the explosion had half crushed the armored portion of the Humvee; the heavy doors were distended like a rib cage. The engine and forward wheels were nowhere to be seen.

The spreading fire covered the exposed underside, which was now topside; black smoke reeking of diesel marked the pyre. Ritter scrambled into the blast crater and looked inside. Mattingly was there, dangling in her seat. Her right arm extended to the ground, her hand cupped. Ritter reached into the arm-wide gap, made by the misshapen door, and grabbed her arm and shook it. He called her name but heard nothing but a monstrous mosquito whine.

He let go of her and grasped the misshapen door. The heat burned through his gloves as he struggled to open the door, but it was sunk into the ground like a tombstone. He grabbed the Humvee frame and tried to augment his strength with a leg, but the door didn’t budge. He fell back on his ass when his grip slipped.

He looked around. Where the hell was everyone?

He crawled back to the gap on his hands and knees and looked inside. Black smoke curdled in the depths. He held Mattingly’s hand and yelled, “Jennifer! Jennifer, I’m right here!” He could finally hear his voice, tiny and weak. Her hand twitched in his grasp.

“Can you hear me? I’m going to get you out of this. Just hold on!” He gave her hand another squeeze and scrambled back to his feet. Black smoke blew into his face as he pulled in a breath to shout for help; the smoke sent him reeling away from the Humvee. He knelt beneath the smoke and tried to breathe.

Mattingly’s Humvee lurched off the ground as a muffled explosion burst within, as if someone had given a dead dog a good kick. Ritter’s mind scrambled to make sense of this new horror. He came to a quick and terrible answer; the fire had set off one of the grenades.

“No no no no no…” He lunged for the door but was stopped in midair. He struggled forward, but the Humvee moved away from his grasp. He flailed his arms in panic and hit something; he looked over his shoulder. Shelton was there, grasping the carry handle on Ritter’s armor. He was dragging Ritter away from the fire as another explosion rocked the Humvee.

“They’re gone!” Shelton screamed. He pulled Ritter another dozen meters from their Humvee, then dropped Ritter to the ground. Ritter watched as flames engulfed the Humvee until there was nothing to see but flames.

Shelton pulled Ritter to his feet and asked a question Ritter couldn’t hear. Ritter stared at the flames, his whole world there.

Shelton smacked a palm against Ritter’s helmet. “I said, are you hurt? Focus, damn you!”

Ritter looked at Shelton. He thought he’d see the angry face of a commander, struggling to manage chaos. Instead, he saw his friend. His friend who was just as scared and hurt as he was. Ritter put a hand on Shelton’s shoulder.

“I’m all right. Fine, fine…I’ll be fine,” Ritter said.

“Fuck you—you’re all right,” Shelton said.

Ritter tightened his grip on Shelton; he suddenly needed help standing up. His vision swam as his words slurred. “Told you…I’m…” His knees buckled as he stumbled into Shelton. Shelton hooked an arm under Ritter to keep him on his feet.

“Medic!” Shelton shouted.

“Do you think the commander was near that?” Nesbitt said in a whisper. Channing shrugged in response as he switched his radio between channels, scanning for news or orders.

“Nesbitt, if you don’t shut your goddamn mouth, I will shoot you in your tiny dick,” Kilo said. He was prone behind his sniper rifle, scanning the power plant through his high-powered scope. Kovalenko knelt beside him, binoculars glued to his face.

The explosion had sent a ripple of overpressure through the date palm trees, loosening overripe dates from their bulbous cradles. Dates sprinkled into the dirt, landing with the sound of muffled footsteps.

Sergeant First Class Young rushed from a knot of bushes to Kovalenko’s side. “Anything?” he asked.

“Nothing on the company frequency,” Kovalenko said.

“Should we move in?” Young asked with no pretext.

Kovalenko rapped the top of the binoculars with a forefinger, a nervous tick he chastised himself for. He knew the only thing worse than an idiot lieutenant was a lieutenant who couldn’t make a decision. His orders were to stop the enemy from escaping through his little piece of the battlefield, not race face-first into danger. How many Soldiers had been hurt in that explosion? Did they need his help?

This is lose-lose, he thought. “Here’s what we’ll do—”

“Contact,” Kilo hissed. Kovalenko froze, then slowly lowered himself to the ground.

“Three dismounts. Ten o’clock. Warehouse with the black roof,” Kilo said.

Abu Ahmet crouched next to Samir as the bomb maker spliced two electric cords together. He adjusted his black ski mask for the hundredth time, trying to breathe through any part that didn’t stink from the previous wearer’s halitosis. He vowed to burn all their masks when they made it home. He and his three men wore the masks to protect themselves from recognition by al-Qaeda’s men and the Americans. Trust wasn’t something Abu Ahmet extended beyond his tribe.

Samir rolled his mask up over his eyes and mumbled, “Now I know why Mukhtar’s bomb maker died. He had no idea what he was doing.” He stripped the plastic from a wire with his teeth.

Theeb pulled a hand mirror from his back pocket, careful to keep the reflective side against his body. “Samir, tell me when you’re done so I can send the signal,” he said.

“Why is this connection outside where we can get shot? Why didn’t you run it into the building where we can work in the shade?”

“Samir…”

“Why not run another meter of wire? Or put the connection box closer to this side of the building?”

“Samir!” Theeb yelled.

Samir shook an impatient hand at Theeb, then gave the exposed copper strands a final twist. Samir’s eyes followed the wire up the side of the warehouse and across the narrow road behind the warehouse. The wire went straight to Mukhtar’s perch, deep inside the ruined power plant. “It should work now,
inshallah.
” God willing.

A door leading into the warehouse burst open; Khalil came in, holding an AK in each hand. He handed one to Abu Ahmet and kept the other. Theeb held up the mirror, bouncing the sun’s rays toward the distant superstructure.

“Get ready. We run, and we don’t stop until we get to our truck,” Abu Ahmet said.

A glint flashed from the distant building.

“Let’s go!” Abu Ahmet stood and rushed across the street, Theeb and Khalil close behind. They stopped behind a roofless building, waiting for Samir. Samir fumbled with his mask as he scampered across the road. He made it halfway, then dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Abu Ahmet opened his mouth to scream at Samir; then he heard the crack of the distant rifle.

“Samir!” Abu Ahmet yelled.

Theeb turned and saw his friend facedown in the street. He took a step toward him, but Abu Ahmet pulled him back, shaking his head. “No. Sniper.”

“We can’t leave him!” Khalil yelled. He held his AK-47 around the corner and let loose a burst.

“Too dangerous! The Americans never miss,” Abu Ahmet said. Samir hadn’t moved; a pool of blood crept from his body, fighting the thirsty dust for purchase.

“He has the camera,” Theeb said.

Abu Ahmet’s tactical opinion changed immediately. Without that camera, they wouldn’t get paid. Abu Ahmet reached out and shoved Theeb toward Samir’s body. Theeb stumbled forward and grabbed Samir’s wrists. Abu Ahmet fired his rifle at the Americans he couldn’t see, hoping to buy Theeb the seconds he needed.

Theeb dragged Samir from the road, his sandaled feet struggling for traction. A bullet snapped past his face a full second before he heard the rifle’s crack. Theeb pulled Samir behind the wall. He lifted Samir’s head and looked into the corpse’s half-open eyes. Theeb gave the face a pat. “Samir, are you a martyr?”

Theeb gently lowered Samir’s head and grabbed his wrists again as Abu Ahmet and Khalil grabbed Samir’s legs. As they lifted the body into the air, a glut of deep, red blood spilled from Samir’s chest, leaving a red drop trail as they carried him deep into the complex.