Into Darkness (16 page)

Ritter leapt into the driver’s seat, careful not to touch any of the wires or switches jury-rigged next to the steering wheel. The setup was simple; all the driver had to do was flip two switches to ignite the payload. He searched for a cell phone, radio, or any other wireless device that might be the secondary trigger. His heart raced as his search yielded nothing. The other trigger could be hidden inside the dashboard or be squirreled away elsewhere in the cabin.

He had to get this truck away from the base before someone remotely triggered the bomb with the push of a button.

Shelton stood over the Tunisian, who was covered in blood from his thighs to his feet. Shelton dropped to a knee and ran his hands over the Tunisian’s chest, feeling for a suicide vest. The Tunisian’s head lolled to the side as nonsensical words babbled from his mouth.

“Get him to the medic before he bleeds out,” Shelton said to Greely and Channing. They grabbed the would-be suicide bomber by the armpits and dragged him away. Shelton jumped onto the rear bumper and looked under the tarp covering the bed of the truck.

The ammonia smell got worse as air wafted up from the truck. Twelve oil drums, a mess of blue detonation cord running into each one, greeted him. A crust of silver and gray powder lined the truck bed. He jumped from the bumper and ran to the cab. Ritter sat in the driver’s seat; his hands hovering over the steering wheel.

“We need to get this out of here right now,” Shelton said.

“I can’t find the secondary trigger,” Ritter said.

“Then stop wasting time! Stick it in reverse, and let’s go!”

Ritter’s hands clenched into fists. “I can’t drive a stick!”

“Move, you goddamn Yankee,” Shelton said as he swapped places with Ritter behind the steering wheel. Shelton leaned out the door and pointed to Lieutenant Park, who stood in front of the truck. “Tell everyone to stand to get ready for the Alamo. Then get a Humvee and follow me.” Park nodded and ran back to the base.

Shelton put the truck into reverse and prayed Thomas hadn’t damaged the engine too badly. The transmission clunked as it fell into place.

“I’ll leave this to you. That driver and I need to have a talk,” Ritter said before he ran back to the patrol base.

One of the remaining Soldiers ran behind the truck and positioned himself so Shelton could see him in his side mirror. He raised his hands and proceeded to ground-guide the vehicle-borne IED like it was another Army vehicle, not several tons of explosive death. The other Soldiers kept pace, their weapons at the ready.

Porter wiped his forehead on his shoulder; his hands were covered in the Tunisian’s blood and otherwise engaged with stopping the bastard from bleeding to death. Porter rechecked the flow on the IV; what little saline solution he could get into the Tunisian’s veins bought him more time to ward off shock.

The Tunisian struggled against the straps holding him to the gurney. His eyes strained to look at his legs, which Porter had tied off with tourniquets just above his knees. His stomach was covered by a large bandage, a lump of exposed intestines hidden beneath. Porter jammed a hemostatic bandage into the exit wound on his patient’s right thigh and waited for the clotting agents to do their work.

“Ali, talk to him. I need to know if he can feel his feet or not,” Porter said to the interpreter.

Ali, his face ashen in the presence of so much blood, stood in the doorway leading into the small first aid station. Ali nodded and spoke to the wounded man.

The Tunisian answered, “
Mes jambs, j’ai mal aux mes jambes
.”

“He’s—he’s not making any sense,” Ali stuttered.

“That’s because he’s speaking French,” Ritter said as he pushed past Ali. Ritter stepped into the puddle of blood pooled beneath the stretcher and snapped his fingers over the Tunisian’s face.

“
Who are you?
” Ritter said in French.

The Tunisian squinted and tried to focus his eyes on Ritter.

“
My legs. Please, it hurts so much
,” the Tunisian said.

“Sir, can he feel his legs or not?” Porter said and stuck a syringe into a small jar of clear medicine.

Ritter nodded. “
You’re al-Qaida? Who sent you to do this?
”

“
My legs, please!
” The Tunisian bucked against his restraints. The bandage on his thigh slid loose, and blood spat from the wound onto Porter’s chest. Porter cursed then placed the syringe into his mouth and used his hands to hold the Tunisian’s lower legs against the gurney. He grabbed a clamp from beside the gurney and searched for the perforated artery.

“Sir, tell him to hold still, or he’ll bleed out,” Porter murmured from behind the syringe.

Ritter held a hand against the Tunisian’s chest and used the other to grab a fistful of the man’s scraggly beard. He yanked the Tunisian’s head to face him.

“
Answer me, and I might make the pain stop
,” Ritter said.

The Tunisian smacked his dry lips and said, “
Mukhtar, he sent me
.”

“Sir, I need to give him something for pain. I can’t treat him if he’s flailing around like this. We need to get him to a surgery ward or we’ll lose him,” Porter said as he inserted the syringe into the IV’s injection port.

“No, not yet. He’s high on something, and morphine might kill him.” Ritter stopped Porter with a glance. Porter pulled the syringe out of the IV’s injection site.

“
Please, please give me something
,” the Tunisian said.

“
Where is Mukhtar?
”

“
The house, the big house north of here
,”
the Tunisian said with ice-blue lips.

“
Did you see the Americans he took? Where are they?
” Ritter said.

“
No Americans
…” The Tunisian’s breathing went ragged as his eyes rolled into the back of his head. Ritter placed his fingers on the man’s throat and waited.

“Pulse is hard to find,” he said.

The Tunisian let out a weak moan; his chest didn’t rise again. Porter grabbed a manual resuscitation bag and placed the mask over the Tunisian’s nose and mouth; he handed the attached softball-sized bag to Ritter.

“Two breaths for every thirty compressions.” Porter placed his hands over the Tunisian’s chest. “Ready?”

The car bomb stopped in a dirt field a half mile from the patrol base. Shelton wanted more distance, but that was the spot where the engine died. He left the keys in the ignition and ran to a waiting Humvee.

“Go go go!” he said. Lieutenant Park needed no further encouragement and gunned the engine.

“Lieutenant Park, don’t you ever tell my wife I did that.”

“Roger, sir.”

Shelton’s legs quivered as he got out of the Humvee. His adrenaline high was long gone, and the resulting crash was getting harder to deal with the longer he spent in combat. He wasn’t getting old, he told himself. Just wearing out early.

His patrol base seethed with activity as men loaded, the crew served weapons on their Humvees, and the supply clerk cracked open ammo crates—ready to supply a last stand. Their aptly named “Alamo Plan” had been worked out before they deployed. Their base was deep enough in enemy territory that an attack by hundreds of insurgents was a distinct possibility.

He pulled off his helmet and took measured breaths as he made his way back to the operations center. If he showed signs of stress now, they would infect the entire company, and he needed the Soldiers to focus on defending their little piece of the world before that suicide bomber’s compatriots launched their attack. He stopped. Why hadn’t they attacked yet?

He called up the tower. “Thomas, Nesbitt, do you see anyone on foot moving out there?”

Thomas moved the camouflage netting aside and looked down at his commander. “Nothing, sir.”

“Thomas, did you shoot up that truck?”

“Roger, sir.”

Shelton thought for a moment. That Soldier probably saved the life of everyone on the patrol base. “You ever going to smoke pot again?” he asked.

“Never, sir!”

“All right. You’re off shit duty for the rest of the deployment.” Shelton savored the smile that spread across Thomas’s face and chuckled when he heard the slap of a high five in the guard tower.

Shelton turned the corner leading to the aid station and saw Ritter leaning against the wall, a cell phone in hand and a lit cigarette in his mouth. Cigarette ash had fallen onto his boots and mixed with the fresh blood splatter into the toe of his boots like a hellish painter’s palette.

“Why aren’t you interrogating that son of a bitch?” Shelton asked.

“Because he didn’t know much and because he’s dead,” Ritter deadpanned as he hit the dial button on his cell.

“Who are you calling?”

“The guy that called in the bomb threat. I figure we owe him a ‘thank you’ or two. I had him a few minutes ago, but he said he had an emergency to deal with, and I haven’t been able to get him back,” Ritter said, his eyes still on his cell.

“Who is he?”

“Said he’s Abu Ahmet al-Qarghuli. I met him briefly back at the canal we fished that body out of.”

“The guy with Sheikh Majid…The Qarghulis have been trying to kill us since the war started. Why would they save our ass?”

Ritter brought his bloodshot eyes up to look at his old friend. “That’s why I’m calling him back.”

Shelton nodded and turned to leave.

“Greg?” Ritter lowered the cell phone. He wanted to tell Shelton that he and Mukhtar had a history. Mukhtar knew he was here, and that was why a car bomb had almost made it to their doorstep. And the longer Ritter stayed at Patrol Base Dragon, the more he put the men under Shelton’s command in danger. The truth should’ve been easy. The truth should have set him free, but the truth died in his throat.

“I’ll let you know when I get him on the phone,” he said.

Porter zipped the Tunisian’s body bag shut and wondered what they were supposed to do with the body. The company had made several kills during the deployment, all of them well beyond the boundaries of the patrol base, and handling the enemy dead was never an issue. The Iraqis would gather any bodies and bury them before the day was over.

Captain Ritter had told him the dead man was probably from North Africa, one of the “Maghreb” countries. Porter wasn’t sure what a “Maghreb” was, but he doubted anyone else from those countries was nearby to pick up this corpse. Porter stepped back from the body and shook his head. He’d ask Lieutenant Park to call mortuary affairs back at Victory once the excitement died down. Besides, the body wouldn’t start to stink for a couple of days.

The blood all over the floor was the immediate issue. Dime-sized drops led from the building’s entrance to the gurney, interspersed with streaks of dark-red blood from where the Tunisian’s soaked clothes had touched the ground as he was dragged into the aid station. The Tunisian’s blood was smeared under and around the gurney; it had leaked through the mesh gurney and had been subsequently spread by errant footsteps. A list of blood-borne pathogens tugged at Porter’s mind, and no one else was in a hurry to clean up the mess.

He opened his storage locker and pulled out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bottle that was too light. He shook the bottle; the slosh told him there was barely any left. He checked the locker; no other bottles of hydrogen peroxide were there.

“Damn it,” he said. Hydrogen peroxide was the best way to clean spilled blood. It was no use asking the supply clerk if he had more stashed away somewhere; the only place for hydrogen peroxide was Porter’s cabinet. His other option was bleach. Unfortunately, there was plenty of bleach in his locker.

Sergeant First Class Young would chant, “Bleach is the smell of clean” whenever he hosted a “barracks party,” the non sequitur name for mandatory hands-and-knees cleaning. For Porter, bleach was the smell of pain.

Porter mixed bleach into a bucket of water and stirred it with the top end of his mop. The smell evoked memories of his first tour in Iraq as a crew medic with an air ambulance company. In Vietnam, a casualty had a decent chance of living if he made it on an air medevac. Because roadside bomb blasts caused most of the injuries in Iraq, “traumatic amputations” were all too common. Porter’s patients had bled and screamed, their cries audible through the roaring wind and engines of the Black Hawk helicopter in flight.

Once his patients were handed off to a trauma facility, it was his job to clean the helicopter. Bleach was his only tool; he added it to jerricans of water and flushed out the bloody helicopters before scrubbing them out by hand. After a year of cleaning helicopters, strange things smelled of bleach. He smelled it when he ate, when he looked at the pristine floor of a helicopter, and every time he washed his hands. Each time he caught a whiff of bleach, his mind took him back to the airborne ambulance. Men and women had cried for their friends and loved ones or begged him to say whether their limbs were still there. Lying, like any skill, improves with practice.