Without Warning (26 page)

When the specialist came back down, he spit a green stream in the sand, his cheeks bulging from a wad of chew. “Fuckin’ ragheads.”

The volume of fire going downrange was impressive and deafening, nearly drowning out the shouts of Lieutenant Euler and his noncoms as they organized the counterambush with the infantry troops who had linked up with them.

Melton did his best to collect himself and commit to memory as many details as possible. He would write notes out later, when the immediate danger had passed, and his hands, hopefully, weren’t shaking too much. As always the head rush of contact was giddy and horrifying, a glassy funnel of light and color down which you fell as soon as you realized somebody was trying to take your life. Melton found it harder to deal with as a reporter than he had as a soldier, perhaps because he was older and wiser, perhaps because now he had nothing to distract him from the experience. Indeed, having the experience and recording it for others were his sole reasons for being there. He couldn’t shut down and get on with whatever task the sergeant or corporals assigned him. He played his part by opening his senses to the madness of battle, letting it burn its terrors directly onto his cortex.

He savored the taste of the dust in his mouth, the gritty, choking, dog-shit-and-tangy-metallic-diesel flavor of it. He noted the struggle of a green, be-jeweled bug caught in a wad of gum stuck to the side of Alcibiades’s boot. Tried to freeze in his memory the smell of the man next to him, a cloying miasma
of body odor, stale farts, and wintergreen Skoal brand chewing tobacco. He studied the contours of the street, the way the ancient biscuit-colored buildings snaked away, slightly uphill. The yellow-green, foul-smelling stream of raw sewage and trash that flowed downslope toward him. The soldiers themselves, some cool and frosty, others sweating but focused, most of them scared out of their minds.

Lieutenant Euler took shelter behind a pockmarked stone pillar that might well have stood on the same spot since the time of Muhammad. He was on the radio with a map in his hand, looking at something Melton couldn’t see. The radio operator kept security, his carbine traversing along the rooftops, looking for snipers, RPG gunners, or any other Iraqi in desperate need of a new weeping asshole in the middle of their forehead.

Top Jaanson was doing the standard shoot, move, and communicate drill, moving the soldiers, infantry and cavalry both, around the restricted battle space of the narrow street like a brutal chess master. Some soldiers would balk while others would execute on command. With some, Jaanson calmed them with a pat on the shoulder and a few fatherly words the way one would handle a terrified horse. With others, it was a boot imprint on the ass.

Melton couldn’t help but smile, having been there himself.

He saw a bird, swooping up and away to escape the sudden eruption of slaughter, suddenly fly apart in a spray of feather and blood as some stray round punched right through its frail body. The remains dropped into the dust, raising a small puff of dirt, and the body twitched for a few seconds as dumb electrical storms raged through its shattered nervous system.

Alcibiades saw it, too. “Fuck me, man. Not safe for man or beast in this motherfucker. I say call in Air and let them fucking hammer this place back to the Stone Age.”

“Hooah,” Melton said before he could stop himself. He tapped Al on the shoulder. “Got any dip, Specialist?”

Specialist Alcibiades pulled a can from his hip pocket. “Got a whole log before we left. I’m about half through it so you’d better make me look good. Hooah?”

Melton took the can of Skoal and nodded. “Hooah, Specialist. Fucking hooah.”

The dip in his mouth and the can returned to Alcibiades, he tried to lock himself down on reality. But no matter how hard he tried to anchor himself in the real world, time always seemed to warp and stretch, before snapping back on these moments, almost as though it, too, had become an actor in the conflict, constantly turning and folding in on itself to better examine the deeds of the frail, ridiculous little creatures who raged through its currents. It
might have been four minutes or many hours before the Apaches arrived overhead and announced themselves with a whoosh of rockets and the industrial thumpety-thump-thump-thump of their thirty-mike-mike chain guns. Half the street ahead of them disintegrated, quite literally, flying apart under the kinetic hammer of high-velocity explosive ordnance. Blocks of sandstone and dried mud shattered and crumbled, releasing their mass in the form of thick powdery clouds to drift away on the warm sirocco passing over the village.

“Apaches will do,” croaked Alcibiades. “I feel like dancing every time they play my tune. Sing it, fuckers!”

Melton stayed down, rub-fucking the ground, as the fire from the soldiers of the Rock of the Marne tapered off. For a brief interlude, silence as heavy as an old coat lay over them. He heard the crunch of boots moving across broken masonry through the ringing in his ears. The rattle of equipment as men darted forward. The metallic click and slide of a mag being swapped out. Slowly, carefully, he raised his head over the cover. Their concrete beam had been badly chewed over by gunfire. Pockmarks and dark scores pitted and scarred the surface. One rusted spike of rebar glistened in the sun, a silver fang sliced out of its dull, reddish length by the impact of a single bullet. Melton let his peripheral vision take over for a second, scanning for any movement that would indicate the presence of a lingering threat. A window pushed open to accommodate the barrel of a sniper’s rifle. A door creaking backward into a darkened hut, from whence some maniac in a dynamite vest might emerge shouting “Saddam is great!” before detonating himself. But there was nothing. The Apaches had cleaned up the ambush, and probably a fair number of unlucky innocents as well.

Alcibiades arose beside him like an apparition, the muzzle of his rifle sweeping through a narrow arc in front of them, covering the men who were scoping out the rubble under which their attackers had died. Melton waited for the call of “Medic!”

It never came. Whatever injuries the troopers had taken did not require immediate intervention. He kept his personal weapon to hand but consciously dialed back on the tension compressing his whole body into an impacted mass of nerve endings. They’d survived another one. The brigade and most of the Third Infantry Division had been remarkably lucky so far. Less than twenty KIA after days of fighting, and all of them lost in close-quarters battles like this one. Out on the desert plains, where they’d first engaged the Iraqis, it had been a pure slaughter. Nobody had any idea of the enemy’s casualties, but in this sector alone it ran into the thousands. Perhaps more than ten thousand by now.

Lieutenant Euler appeared beside him, handing back a receiver to his radio operator.

“D’you get all that, sir?” he asked. “Gotta keep the folks at home informed.”

It was an attempt at light banter, but the young officer’s eyes were too tired and far away to carry it off.
Sleep when you are dead
became the unofficial motto of the soldiers. Bret Melton nodded absently and spit into the ground, the nicotine slowly infiltrating his wired nervous system.

“Any casualties, Lieutenant?” he asked.

Euler shook his head.

“Nothing serious. No sucking chest wounds or lost limbs so I’ll count myself a happy man. Worthless fedayeen fucktards. Sometimes I think they shoot high and wide, praying to get fucking captured.”

Saddam’s volunteer militia had borne the brunt of the fighting in the crossroads towns, and although they’d handed out some grief here and there, as a fighting force they seemed to be tasked with holding up the coalition and making them “waste” ammunition and lives. The coalition didn’t have the troops to provide EPW facilities, so without an order per se, the higher-ups let it be known that there would be no quarter. Some units in Third ID had taken up the old practice of flying a black flag from an antenna. It didn’t take long for the Iraqis to figure out what that meant.

As a tactic, Melton had to admit that sending your worthless troops forward as bullet catchers made some sense. Everyone knew they weren’t pushing on to Baghdad now, that’d be insane. The British and U.S. forces executing Operation Katie in southern Iraq were planning to leave the whole leprous mess to fester on its own when they were gone. That was assuming they could kick the Kuwaitis and the Saudis off so they could actually get the hell out of Dodge. The tiny Polish and Australian special-forces contingents were already gone, what missions they’d originally been assigned now irrelevant. And Saddam was openly mocking them from Baghdad, whipping up a perfect storm of pan-Arab hysteria at his “defeat” of the infidel crusaders.

Well, not openly. Not since we dropped that JDAM on Uday.

Saddam still made appearances in the open, but they were never televised live, and they never lasted very long. They did hit the mark, though. The allied air campaign went forward pretty much as originally planned, from what Melton heard the air force liaison say, attempting to decapitate his command-and-control systems. The only difference was that coalition air power destroyed bridges they originally needed. But as long as the fat little fucker survived to taunt them, his stature only grew. He was openly comparing himself to Saladin now, declaring himself the reborn leader of the faithful.

The crackle of gunfire drifted in over the rooftops of the surviving buildings from somewhere to the west, another element of Third ID conducting sweep-and-clear ops to make sure that everyone, ladie dadie everyone, could withdraw through this shithole without getting nickel-and-dimed to death by snipers and suicide bombers and the half-assed incompetents tricked out like Arab ninjas who called themselves the Fedayeen Saddam.

Euler’s men were moving toward one of the remaining intact bridges, in tandem with another platoon taking a parallel route two streets over. Apaches from the squadron’s air cav component buzzed about high overhead, waiting to pounce on any resistance. When Operation Katie went into effect, the rule book was thrown out along with it. Melton remembered Captain Lohberger saying,
Fuck the rules of engagement,
before he buttoned up his Bradley so many days ago. Somebody seemed to have handed Third ID’s commander, Major General Blount, an open checkbook.

No one took any chances. If a building needed to be swept, soldiers tossed frags through the door, then the M249 SAW gunner sprayed the room before they went in. If the Iraqis decided a mosque prayer tower made a pretty good forward observation post, an MPAT round from one of 5/7’s M1 Abrams tanks chopped it down. If they used a school or a hospital for a fort, the division’s artillery hammered it with one-five-five or MLRS rounds.

No one took any chances anymore.

“Who you writin’ for now, anyway, Bret?” Alcibiades was beside him, his eyes hidden behind the silver of a pair of Ray-Bans. They gave him an insec-tile appearance as he scanned the blasted remains of the thoroughfare ahead, the muzzle of his rifle tracking the movements of his head with mechanical precision.
“Army Times
is gone, right? Like everything else.”

Unlike the officers, most of the grunts just called him by his first name. He didn’t have to work hard to fit in with them.

“Headquarters is, but we’ve got field offices in Europe and Korea,” said Melton, not that he had had any luck getting in touch with any of them. “And worse comes to worst, there is always
Stars and Stripes,
I suppose. I had some contacts from my freelance days, foreign websites and magazines, you know, British mostly. I’m filing for them now. The war’s not nearly as big a story as it would have been. But it’s up there.”

They formed up again with Alcibiades’s scout team, picking their way through the rubble, stepping over tumbledown walls and mounds of pulverized mud brick. Melton stood on something soft and yielding, and before he could stop himself he glanced down and saw the tiny arm beneath his soiled boots. It ended in ragged flesh and a stump of white bone, just after the elbow joint.

He spit on the ground next to the remains and whispered, “Yeah. Fuck the rules of engagement. Hooah.”

Lieutenant Euler’s Bradley, Fiddler’s Green, was burning a few hundred yards short of the bridge over the Euphrates. One of the crew had made it out, only to be shot down from a window in one of the low-rise, ferroconcrete bunkers that passed for apartments in this part of Nasiriyah. His crewmates had not escaped.

“They’ve got a fucking howitzer in one of those buildings with the muzzle aimed into the street. Or maybe a T72. I can’t tell, damn it,” said Euler, who was blessed not to be in the Bradley at the time. The binoculars came down from his eyes as he turned away from the corner to address his squad leaders.

“Fuck me runnin’. Either it is Republican Guard or someone who has got their shit wired tight,” Euler said.

Melton chanced a quick peek around the corner, darting his head out and back like a nervous chipmunk. He took a sight picture of the disabled Brad. The rear troop hatch was gone and the turret was missing. Rounds cooked off in the main body, one at a time, with the sound of an M80 firecracker under a steel bucket. It made a hollow thump with each cook-off. Thick, oily smoke poured from the commander’s hatch, and flames burned at the rear of the chassis.

Euler spoke quickly and privately with his platoon sergeant, while Melton fell back to give the two some space. After a few words, Euler held his hand out to his radio operator for the handset of their SINCGARS radio.

“Airstrike,” said Alcibiades as he spat into the ground. “Betcha this week’s pay the LT will call in some A10s. Probably gonna flatten a coupla blocks.”

“We ain’t getting paid this month,” said Bakic, one of his buddies.

“Still gonna be an …”

“What the fuck!”

Euler hadn’t shouted, but the force of his exclamation had drawn all the attention back on him. He was talking on the radio, and everyone listened to his side of the exchange, which didn’t tell them much.

“What d’you fucking mean …” Euler paused while the voice on the other end shouted loud enough for Melton to hear a time-honored army phrase.