Licensed to Kill (21 page)

Across the river, the HART team found itself caught in a triangle of bullets and mortars fired back and forth between the insurgents and the CPA. Gray Branfield started negotiating with members of the militia to try to gain safe passage for his men to evacuate. The militia assured Gray that they only intended to target the CPA and offered to provide an escort out of town for the HART group. Gray went upstairs to consult his men and discuss their options. They could lock down and sit out the fighting, relying on the militia's guarantee that they were not targets; they could take the militia's offer of safe escort out of the area; or they could wait for coalition forces to extract them. The contractors didn't know if the offer of safe passage was genuine or a trick to get them out into the open. Since they could see about fifty militia members in the street around the house, they were suspicious. In a joint decision, and weighing the unknowns of an angry mob and a diffident Ukrainian response, the HART team decided to sit it out.

When Gray went downstairs to tell the assembled crowd that they planned to stay, the other team members readied their weapons to set up protective cover. Angered by their foiled ruse to bring the contractors outside, the militia members began shouting at Gray. Then there was the unmistakable clack of an AK being taken off safety, and two shots rang out, then a long burst of gunfire with bullets splintering the parapets on the rooftop and cracking into the open door.

Gray stormed back inside the house and tried to slam the door as an Iraqi ran toward him with a pointed weapon. One of the HART contractors fired a shot, and the Iraqi went down. The team member called out asking if Gray was okay and heard back, “I'm not good.” Two contractors ran to help him but quickly realized he was almost beyond help. Though still alive and conscious, he had obviously suffered a full blast on auto from an AK at close range and was bleeding profusely from multiple wounds in his torso and shattered knee. Their first thought was to get away from the unsecured doorway and drag Gray up the vertical steel ladder to the roof, but before they could, one of the militia members tossed a grenade inside the house. The men dove behind a steel water tank to shield themselves from the blast. Grenade shrapnel ripped out whatever life had been left in Gray's body, and the other contractors reluctantly left his corpse to retreat to the relative security of the rooftop.

Bullets ricocheted off the house as more militia began to arrive and moved to surround the building. After a brief pause in the gunfire, four local Iraqi HART employees, who the contractors suspected had joined the militia, showed up at the house and begged the men to leave. The men looked at the four of them and the crowd outside and shook their heads. “No.”

Across the river, the CPA compound was still under heavy attack. RPG rounds were exploding with increasing tempo, mortars slammed home, and bullets whined and ricocheted off the structures By 3:00
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., they were surrounded, with attacks coming at them from all four sides as what was estimated to be a few hundred Iraqis poured fire into the compound. An air-raid siren sounded throughout the compound, and word spread quickly that reinforcements were coming by air. Fighter jets thundered over the city, but again dropped no ordnance.

Ammunition was beginning to run low in the towers, and the civilians shuttled boxes of ammo and reloaded magazines as fast as they could. One civilian was pressed into service as a spotter for a contractor in the northwest tower. An RPG hit the concrete T-wall directly below them, and bullets kicked into the sandbags and wall of the tower. Another RPG exploded against the wall before the shooter went down with a well-aimed shot from a contractor. With the towers under increasingly heavy and accurate fire, Turner ordered everyone to retreat into the hotel. An e-mail arrived from headquarters at 3:53: “Please know we are doing all we can from this end. The MND [Multi-National Division] is working with some fast movers [jets] and they do have some identified targets and collateral damage is not a concern. Be prepared and keep your head down.”

Nothing. The jets patrolled the air, pushing the insurgents into positions of cover, but refused to drop their load. By 4:30 the contractors were exhausted and running out of water. The civilians offered to replace the contractors manning the firing line.

At 5:47, both the KBR office and the Triple Canopy house were hit, and more mortar rounds began landing closer and closer to the hotel. The staff moved to the inside hallways to avoid the intense and increasingly accurate hits.

At about 6:00
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., just as it seemed they were about to be overrun by the insurgents, an odd silence settled over the compound, making for a surreal pause in what had been a long day of nonstop violence. John Turner received word by phone that the Ukrainian general had arranged for a ceasefire until nine the next morning and that he was scheduled to meet leaders of the Mahdi Army at 7:30
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. Shortly afterward, however, bullets began to fly between Ukrainian soldiers, Triple Canopy contractors, and the militia on the northern edge of the CPA compound. An intense firefight lasted roughly five minutes before the compound fell silent again.

Two Apache helicopters showed up to hover over the area for a few hours. The besieged men took advantage of the lull in fighting to resupply ammunition to the defensive positions. They broke MREs out of their heavy brown wrappers and swallowed bites of food in between loading magazines. The Ukrainian soldiers were poorly equipped in general and certainly weren't prepared to fight at night. The KBR contractors supplied them with flashlights, radios, and other equipment, and Triple Canopy gave them fresh ammo after their stock ran low.

At 8:00
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., the group was informed that General Ostrovsky of the Ukrainian contingent would not negotiate with the militia but that the ceasefire remained in effect. One hour later, however, they heard more incoming RPGs and mortars from across the river, lasting about fifteen minutes. Then John Turner received word that a Special Forces ODA team was readying for insertion and would come help defend the compound. A helicopter extraction plan was supposedly also in the works. The optimism for salvation would last a few hours, until new word came to inform them that the Ukrainian general had scratched the plans because he deemed it too dangerous to land a helicopter in the compound.

Meanwhile, in the besieged HART house, the cat-and-mouse battle continued as the militia fired up at the rooftop. In the midafternoon, a HART team member had called the CPA and the Ukrainian military base, informing them of Gray's death and their retreat under attack to confinement on the roof of their building. He had requested immediate evacuation. The HART team had prepared the roof for a helicopter extraction, but by early evening it appeared obvious one would not be coming. Taking regular small-arms fire and an occasional RPG, the HART men were surrounded and abandoned. The militia sent a negotiator up to a neighboring rooftop and urged the men to come out. The Mahdi militia said it wanted to take the men to their headquarters, where another group would escort them out of the city. It sounded like another trick, or hostage trap, so the HART team tried to buy time, hoping that the Ukrainians or Americans would finally send in a team to extract them. They went through the motions of negotiation until well after midnight, when it became clear that the ruse could be continued no longer. The men broke off their talks with the militia members, and were within minutes under attack by more small-arms fire and a couple of grenades tossed up on the roof. The vicious attack lasted only briefly, until the militia redirected its weapons toward the more attractive target across the river.

The Mahdi militia were put on the defensive after AC-130 gunships started circling, coordinating with those inside the compound to target insurgent positions. Many of the Triple Canopy contractors had been trained in their previous military career to do close air support, and a chain of communications was developed to relay the targeting information provided by the contractors to the aircraft prowling the sky above. The AC-130 circled at a constant altitude, providing a stable platform for 105-mm manually loaded cannons, 20-mm chain guns, and 40-mm grenade launchers, selecting targets with their powerful FLIR (forward looking infrared) spotlights, which identify humans heat sources and even warm engines as bright white glowing objects on the targeting screen.

The military requested that every gun in the compound open up to draw the insurgent fire for targeting purposes—an old trick to flush out the enemy. Cheered on by having the big guns for support, the civilians headed to the roof of the hotel, until the GC, Marc Etherington, ordered everyone to respect the nonexistent ceasefire. Disappointed, they stood down. But their shooting to draw enemy fire was apparently unnecessary, since a few minutes later the insurgents unleashed everything they had with devastating effect. The hotel rocked with multiple hits. Tracers and muzzle flashes quickly revealed enemy positions across the river. The gunship operators kept up a steady radio chatter with the Triple Canopy contractors, since the barrage of fire had allowed them to locate multiple enemy positions. They paused for permission to engage, but the Ukrainian general refused to allow the gunship to open fire, reasoning that the enemy positions were on top of schools, houses, and civilian structures. Despite the order, the AC-130 took out locations across the street from the compound and at least one mortar position. At 1:45
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., two Apache helicopters showed up, replacing the gunship and providing rotating air cover. Their presence alone successfully suppressed the heavy fire against the compound.

Turner had realized by then that the insurgents had been listening on the radios stolen from the compound by the fleeing Iraqi guards. He assembled the exhausted group to relate the good news in person—the Ukrainian command had put together ten armored troop carriers with air cover, and just before dawn they would break through the city to rescue the men inside the compound. A sense of jubilation overcame the exhaustion, and the men set to work planning for their evacuation. At 4:35
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, the group gathered together with their go bags, weapons, and critical equipment, waiting impatiently for the sound of helicopters and diesel engines. They soon learned that General Ostrovsky had canceled the extraction plan as too risky and likely for failure. John Turner and the CPA-based Ukrainian commander began immediately creating their own plan using the available resources in the compound. They had a collection of armored and soft-skin SUVs belonging to the security companies and could coordinate for air cover with the hovering Apaches. They had to hurry to make a self-imposed 6:00
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. launch date, since after morning prayers the Mahdi Army would begin setting up their mortars and readying for a new day's offensive—something the compound probably couldn't endure for another day, considering how low their supplies had run.

When the men in the HART house heard that the CPA was pulling out, they decided to trust two of their employees who offered to help them make a break for it. They put on local headscarves and made their way to the roof of an adjacent building, climbing down in the darkness to a silver Pajero SUV. They drove slowly out of town in the direction of al Amarah as the sun rose into the sky.

By 6:00
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., vehicles were loaded and Apaches circled above the CPA compound. KBR staff piled into the CRG armored vehicles, but there was some shuffling to see who got the favored seats in the armored vehicles and who would ride out in the soft skins and large military trucks. The CPA pulled rank. By 6:15, the convoy was ready to go and lined up on the road leading out of the compound. The Ukrainians bookended the convoy in their BTR-60 Russian-made armored troop carriers, with the security companies' armored cars driving in the next layer, while the one soft skin and the rest of the military vehicles rode in the middle of the convoy. The entire group was just waiting for the GC to get off the phone.

Marc Etherington, the CPA's governate coordinator, was still talking to General Ostrovsky, begging him to reverse his order and send in reinforcements. It was apparent he did not want to abandon his post. He ordered a CRG car to block the convoy's departure route, but the security contractors refused to obey his orders. A near revolt broke out as the group of men began shouting at the GC to get the hell in the car. Finally, an army captain of the force protection team told the GC he would be left behind if he didn't get in one of the trucks. Etherington relented, and at 6:20 the convoy left out the back gate. Not a shot was fired as they drove through town. At 7:40, the convoy pulled into the MND base at Al Kut airfield. Pulling themselves out of the vehicles—tired, dirty, and worn—the KBR and RTI employees handed their weapons back to the Triple Canopy contractors and became civilians again. The United States had abandoned a CPA regional headquarters, but its inhabitants were safe. Shortly afterward, the Ukrainian Army turned control of the town over to Sadr's militia, though U.S. forces would take it back from the Mahdi militia a couple of days later.

Later, the recriminations would fly. The Ukrainians insisted that their 1,650 men—the fourth-largest non-American contingent behind the Poles, the Italians, and the Brits—were there as peacekeepers, not combat troops, and thus were limited in their capability to respond effectively to heavy attack. Others members of the besieged teams would be more blunt. One described the Ukrainians as “cowards,” explaining, “They had all the resources and support to extract us and didn't.” The CPA would blame KBR for not having delivered items like sandbags and SCUD bunkers, and for not having adequate communications. Etherington would come under scathing criticism for risking the lives of the civilian and security contractors, and RTI would reduce its commitment of employees to Iraq after the violence of Al Kut. For the third time that spring the contractors were the target and the thin red line. Although the incidents in An Najaf and Al Kut were downplayed by Bremer and never fully reported in the media, it was clear that Blackwater and other private teams were a far better and more willing partner than many in the war in Iraq. When under fire, the coalition of the billing had stood their ground while the coalition of the willing stood by and watched.