Weapons of Mass Destruction (17 page)

Sajad publicly attributed his resilience to bravery and commitment to the coalition cause. Much more to the point, he had nothing left to lose. His mother and seven siblings had fled to Syria when Saddam executed his father, forcing the family to cover the cost of the bullet lodged in his skull. Sajad was the eldest son. Someone had to stay behind to even the score.

Sajad’s facility with languages was astonishing. He mimicked idiomatic phrases and even gestures with far more nuance than previous interpreters. He had a wonderful sense of humor in five out of his six languages, a sure sign that he negotiated cultural differences with a sharp tongue. The English language’s penchant for euphemisms never ceased to amuse him. He made liberal use of air quotations to underscore his mastery of evasive terminology.

“As you know, I am particularly eager to interrogate Ba’athist officials,” Sajad liked to say, flourishing his forefingers around the word
interrogate
.

Joking aside, Sajad heartily approved of enhanced interrogation techniques, especially in Sunni regions. They dovetailed with his vendetta. His best friend worked as a security guard at Abu Ghraib. This was his dream job. Getting paid to waterboard Saddam’s cronies was almost too good to be true, the best possible way to avenge his father. Harassing dethroned Ba’athists was a close second.

Sajad was due to arrive in five minutes, accompanied by an armed escort. In the meantime, Wolf’s squad was ordered to intercept the white flag, which was still cautiously traversing the patio. Trapp’s pidgin Arabic would have to suffice until the terp showed up. He kept his distance, flanked by Wolf, Logan, and McCarthy. Their four guns were trained on the four insurgents, who stopped dead in their tracks, frantically pointing at what looked like a kitchen towel fastened to a broomstick.

“Marines, we’re not armed,” the leader said in broken English.

“Stay where you are,” Trapp said in Arabic.

“It is safe,” the leader said. “Let us talk.”

“Raise your hands over your heads,” Trapp shouted.

Everyone except the leader obeyed.

“Idiot,” Trapp said under his breath. “Drop the flag and put your hands up,” he shouted in English. His dictionary of stock military phrases had failed to mention anything about dropping flags.

“Cuff them,” Wolf ordered. “He can’t shoot while he’s showing off his dirty laundry.”

Wolf and Logan covered while Trapp and McCarthy advanced. Sinclair was poised and ready to open fire at the slightest provocation. Everyone was annoyed. Taking prisoners was more trouble than it was worth. For one thing, you had to waste personnel guarding them until shuttle teams took them off your hands. The platoon had processed their fair share of detainees en route to Baghdad. During the first few days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the desert looked more like a refugee camp than a battlefield. They had been warned to be on the alert for ambushes masquerading as surrenders. But everyone except Saddam’s Republican Guard was intimidated. Disappointingly so. Nothing was more depressing than the sight of soldiers too demoralized to put up a fight.

A sudden barrage of AK-47 fire propelled Trapp’s team into the dirt. Sinclair saw tracers streaming from the windows of an adjacent compound. Wolf must have spotted them even before they opened fire. He and Logan let loose. Their M249s overpowered the 47s, forcing the enemy gunners to duck back out of range. Trapp’s men scrambled for cover. It was impossible to tell whether the four surrendering men were in cahoots with the gunners. Then one of them lifted the hem of his robe. Sinclair waited until he saw the barrel of a rifle and then squeezed his trigger. Bingo. The impact sent the rifle skittering across the courtyard. The leader was still waving the flag. Shooting unarmed men was against the rules of engagement. Logan plugged him without bothering to confirm malicious intent. Delay and you get blown away. McCarthy picked off the remaining two men while Sinclair was still scoping the folds of their robes.

Sinclair turned his attention to the gunners pinned behind the window frames. He measured the distance and dialed it in. The angle was possible but not probable. RPGs had a far better chance of breaking up the ambush. Wolf and Logan sprayed the windows with automatic fire while the others tried to thread the needle with grenades. Most of them bounced off the walls and detonated in the courtyard below. When one of them laced through a window, the squad cheered. Resistance tapered off and then stopped altogether.

A less seasoned squad might have assumed the enemy had been dispatched. There was no telling how many were left or where they might be hiding. The fact that nobody was seen evacuating the building didn’t mean they were still trapped inside. Underground tunnels were especially common in Ba’athist neighborhoods, where party officials had been prepared for the worst since the Iran-Iraq War. Wolf suspected they were actually playing possum. The only sure way to find out was to rush the compound. It was the kind of last resort the insurgency counted on to nullify superior American firepower.

Radetzky was an aggressive but prudent commander. He virtually never forced his platoon to resort to the last resort. Several of his men appeared on the roof of a neighboring compound, carrying a metal ladder. He had already determined that the distance between the two concrete structures was too wide to jump. The ladder was just long enough to bridge the gap. One by one his squad crossed, arms slicing the air as they struggled to keep their balance. Radetzky hurled his automatic to a spotter to avoid falling. He ended up crawling, rung by rung, to the other side. The squad tried not to laugh until Radetzky himself cracked up.

“So much for officer training.”

Radetzky knew the break in decorum would loosen them up. Like ballplayers, they performed best when oblivious to pressure. Jokes at his own expense were particularly hilarious, a surefire way to bond with his men. It was a delicate balance, being one of them without compromising his authority. He was well aware that his success as a commanding officer relied on loyalty, not just obedience, their willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty. By the time the spotter returned his automatic, Radetzky was back to business as usual. Focused and in control. They followed him down the stairwell, weapons at the ready.

Within a minute it was all over. A handful of enemy fighters hadn’t decamped after all. They were lying low, waiting for Wolf’s team to make the fatal mistake of storming the front door. All but one never knew what hit them, a ballistic testament to Radetzky’s superior strategy. Swift, silent, and deadly. The last of the six was hiding under a bed. He was technically unarmed, having left his rifle at his post in the window. Details, details. Telltale evidence indicated that the compound had been crawling with insurgents. The rest had, in fact, escaped through tunnels.

The two squads converged in the courtyard. Radetzky barked orders, already mentally engaged in the next attack. Wolf spit on the blood-spattered white flag, an emblem of the unworthiness of their enemy. He usually left fist pumping and foul-mouthed bravado to men like McCarthy. But when things got too psychologically complicated to express in four-letter words, Wolf stepped in to provide the catharsis everyone needed to keep PTSD at bay. Radetzky, who trusted him implicitly, turned a blind eye. Commissioned officers were required to make dispassionate decisions, calculating risk and reward with unflinching resolve. Noncommissioned officers picked up the emotional slack. Radetzky was the head, Wolf the heart of the platoon. They were a perfect team.

Wolf spit on dirty towels fastened to the ends of broomsticks, to restore the sanctity of real white flags protecting real civilians. He flipped the bird behind the backs of imperious commanders so his men wouldn’t have to. When rules of engagement endangered the platoon, he broke them. Once he had even shot a dead insurgent in the groin. Desecrating enemy corpses was strictly forbidden. But the bastard had simulated death until Lance Corporal Rodriguez was close enough to get his balls blown off. Trapp tried to stanch the wound, but Roddy died before the evac unit showed up. It was the company’s first casualty in Iraq, a specter of their most visceral anxieties. Killing Roddy’s murderer wasn’t good enough. They needed a graphic illustration that nobody mutilated marines with impunity, and they got one. Everyone felt better after Wolf wasted the prick’s crotch. When he used up one magazine, he loaded another.

Word of the white flag slaughter must have spread through the neighborhood. Foreign fighters, especially Pakistanis, were equipped with state-of-the-art communication devices. This level of technological sophistication debunked claims that Fallujans were mounting a homegrown insurgency. They were caught in the crosshairs of jihad, a global army that transformed guerilla warfare into terrorism. This kind of conflict had no boundaries, national or otherwise, no front lines or even combat zones. The fact that the platoon cleared two blocks without firing a shot didn’t mean the enemy had been vanquished. They were biding their time, playing the long game. Having less powerful weaponry didn’t guarantee that they were at a disadvantage. They just had to be more unpredictable, equal parts moving target and booby trap, masters of the unfair fight.

Radetzky was eager to give chase. The sooner the platoon tracked them down, the less time the enemy would have to regroup in the wake of the white flag debacle. A West Point-trained officer, he never let his training get in the way of adapting to conditions on the ground. At the same time, he never tried to beat jihadis at their own game. The only way to prevail against terrorists was to force them to engage in more conventional forms of warfare, the kind American troops were trained to win. Neighboring platoons were also encountering less resistance, corroborating his theory that a trap was imminent. He radioed Colonel Denning, requesting permission to launch another coordinated offensive. Almost unbelievably, they were ordered to retreat.

“We’re on a roll,” Radetzky told Colonel Denning.

“You’re about to roll right into a mortar field. Salinger’s platoon just got hammered.”

“They’re two quadrants to the south.”

“It’s that big, Radetzky. We’re mounting another air strike.”

They were ordered to fall back three full blocks. Battalion headquarters had tremendous faith in the accuracy of laser-guided missiles. Radetzky prided himself on never having lost a man to friendly fire. He pushed the platoon back even farther. Covering the same terrain in reverse was demoralizing. They had risked their lives every step of the way. Insurgents they had killed that morning were bloated and stinking in the heat. Entire limbs had been gnawed off by dogs wandering in packs, already feral with starvation. One of Sinclair’s kills was unrecognizable as a human being. Location was its only identifying characteristic. Another was almost completely intact. Its lips alone had been chewed off, probably by cats rather than dogs, judging from the relatively dainty teeth marks.

“It’s like mosquitoes,” McCarthy said. “They either like you or they don’t.”

The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached the designated compound. Everyone not assigned to security duty congregated on the roof to watch the bombardment. The sky was ablaze, another stunning sunset in a landscape spectacularly oblivious to violence perpetrated for the sake of tradition or progress, in the name of this or that god. Empires came and went and the desert endured, unfazed. There was something comforting or menacing about its resilience. It would survive the apocalypse.

They could hear but not yet see Bradleys rolling into the neighborhood. Two Cobras crisscrossed the sky and disappeared. As usual, calm descended before the firestorm. The ubiquitous din of gun battles was conspicuously absent in the wake of the retreat. All the mosques in the vicinity had already been silenced. Sinclair noticed for the first time that his ears were ringing. Back home in Montana he loved the quiet. In Fallujah he had learned to dread it.

You could never see them coming, even in the desert. Fighting Falcons materialized instantaneously, precluding defensive measures, let alone evacuations, standard air raid precautions in days of yore. Blinding light eclipsed the sunset. The platoon was far enough away to avoid friendly fire but close enough to feel the secondary impact of laser-guided warheads. They waited for someone to crack the inevitable jokes.

“Just like the Fourth of July.”

“Minus the keg.”

The display of force was impressive, though nothing compared to Baghdad. There had been no-holds-barred there. Specter gunships. Close-support aircraft. Artillery. Everything except helicopters, which were too clumsy to keep pace with the bombardment. Spontaneous combustion. Smoke detectors from Libya to Pakistan must have been going off like crazy, alerting terrorists that there was a new gun in town. Good old Uncle Sam with a holster filled with everything but nukes. At first they had oohed and aahed in jest, like kids at a fireworks display. Pretty soon they weren’t kidding around anymore. Even McCarthy stopped making Armageddon jokes.

Every time they thought the assault had peaked, explosions redoubled. Smoke billowed half a mile high above Baghdad. Tracers arced across the sky, lacing over bright bursts of color. Red. Orange. Blue mushroom clouds. The lighting effects beggared description. It would have been counterproductive to view the spectacle as anything other than a pyrotechnic marvel. They were soldiers, not Red Cross nurses. If hospitals and schools and playgrounds were destroyed, nobody could see them. If actual people were incinerated in beds, at desks, and on merry-go-rounds, nobody could hear them. Assuming the bursts of color had faces, it was best not to make eye contact.

In Fallujah, air strikes hit way too close to home. There was no getting around the fact that familiar landmarks, if not people, were being wasted, neighborhoods the platoon had patrolled on a daily basis. Proximity to targets was physical as well as emotional, just blocks away. Within earshot. The screams of insurgents burning to death haunted Sinclair. His phobia of suicide bombers was matched only by his fear of death by fire. He could never have been a firefighter like McCarthy, whose thick skin was like psychological body armor. Of course you wanted your enemy to suffer, given the alternative. It was either him or you. But there was a limit to how much Sinclair could take, at least in theory. In practice, he had already exceeded the limit. Sometimes he envied drone pilots. They complained about being too far removed from the action, claiming boredom was even worse than sensory overkill. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.