Into Darkness (6 page)

Mukhtar froze for several heartbeats; then his face darkened as his eyes flashed with hate, tickling Abu Ahmet’s mind with old tales of
djinn
. “They are no concern of yours.” He raised a hand and slammed his palm against the tabletop. The slap triggered a bloom of fear in Abu Ahmet’s heart. “No more talk. You have work to do.”

The home of any respectable Iraqi sheikh is in two parts. Half the home is for his family, but the other half is for the tribe. The tribe’s room is a large, single room devoid of furniture but for a few garish couches and single-cushioned seats at the far end of the room. As sheikh of the al-Qarghuli tribe, Majid had the obligation, but never the privilege, to host men of his tribe. The meeting room couldn’t hold the nearly one thousand men in his tribe, but it could hold the two dozen older men and senior fighters.

Majid ran his hand over the gold-colored fabric of his chair. His fingers caressed the thinning fabric, worn down to almost nothing after years of gripping the armrests as he sat in and listened to his relatives bellyache about everything from crops, stolen sheep, and the poor state of the roads through their farms. The bellyaching was always worse in a large gathering like this, since the presence of an audience drove the speakers into fits of attempted eloquence. The occasional turn of a phrase in classical Arabic could liven up a gathering, but it rarely swayed Majid’s decision when holding court. His son, Abdullah, would point out the poor grammar and general ignorance of the attempts once the meetings were done and the room empty. Abdullah had attended a year of college in Baghdad before the Americans came, and that bit of schooling was all Abdullah needed to lord over the mostly illiterate men of the tribe.

Majid adjusted the gold-lined black robe he wore over his clothes and nodded along as one of his tribesmen spoke. The robe was the only official symbol of his sheikhdom and a constant irritant as he sat. He endured yet another complaint about the American lockdown. No one could drive produce to the Baghdad markets or buy fuel for the tractors; the crops would rot in the trucks before anyone could sell them. It was the same litany since the two Americans had been taken.

The tribesman finished his complaint and sat against the wall, squeezing between two men, who fiddled with prayer beads snaked around their hands and wrists. Another man leaped to his feet and cried, “The Americans! They brought their search dogs into my home, and now my wives say angels can’t enter the home for a week. My first wife is pregnant and—”

“Brother.” Sheikh Majid raised his hands, palms out to the angry man. “I know what the Americans are doing. I have been to their base every day to reason with Captain Shelton, but he can think of nothing but his missing men. It is the same as the last time the crusader Soldiers went missing. The Americans will flail about for another day before they exhaust themselves.”

“It isn’t quite the same, Father.” Abdullah rose from his seat next to Majid and addressed the gathering. “When the Black Heart Soldiers raped and murdered that girl and her family, the Janabi tribe took their revenge. That time the Americans found the bodies right away, and their mad search ended. No one knows where the Americans are but al-Qaeda.” Abdullah stretched his gangly arms wide, as though to hug the entire room. “No one in this tribe knows what happened to the Americans. No Qarghuli took part in the attack,” he said as a command, not a statement. The tribesmen nodded slowly; the place was silent but for the
click
,
click
,
click
of prayer beads.

An old man at the end of the hall struggled to his feet and shuffled toward Sheikh Majid. His weak voice was barely audible. “My sheikh, there is something we must discuss.”

Sheikh Majid covered his heart with his right hand in a gesture of respect. “Please, Tariq, tell us this matter.”

Tariq stopped next to Abdullah and did his best to raise his voice. “The Douri tribe lives near my farm. Every so often my granddaughter will buy chickens from them, and yesterday—”

Abdullah placed a hand on Tariq’s bony shoulder. “Tariq, if this is some small dispute, we can settle it at another time. The crusader curfew is approaching.”

Tariq did his best to shrug off Abdullah’s touch. He craned his neck to look Abdullah in the eyes and cried, “You must listen!” Abdullah took a half step back, shocked at the old man’s passion.

Tariq turned to Sheikh Majid. “My granddaughter tells me that Hamsa, one of al-Qaida’s
emirs
, snatched one of the Douri tribe’s girls off the street and brought her to their house near the old police station. He raped the girl.” Tariq’s voice creaked as tears squeezed from his eyes. “He raped her…Before he let her go, he gave her a letter.” Tariq stuffed his hand into a pocket and pulled out an envelope, then proffered it to Abdullah.

“I don’t read, my sheikh, but my granddaughter does.” Tariq’s liver-spotted hand shook as he struggled to keep the skeletal arm in the air. Majid nodded to Abdullah, who opened the envelope and read the piece of paper it contained. “Al-Qaeda said that the girl gave her virginity to a prince of al-Qaeda, and because of this gift, she is still worthy of marriage.” The assemblage broke into curses and angry whispers.

Abdullah lowered the letter and nodded. “That’s what the letter says.”

“The Douri tribe is weak, but this shame is too much for their honor. They can’t fight al-Qaeda to avenge the girl. Too many of their men were killed by the Americans or are sitting in their jails. What could they do to keep their honor?” Tariq lifted a crooked finger and passed it over the sitting men. “They killed the raped girl to save their honor.”

The revelation was met not with outrage but with silence. “They could not kill Abu Hamsa, so the girl had to die. Since al-Qaeda came to Iraq, they have taken more and more from the Iraqis. We welcomed them as guests to fight the Americans. We let them enforce Islamic law in Rasheed, let them collect taxes at the Rasheed market. They let filthy Syrians and Jordanians mediate disputes between the tribes.” Spit flew from yellow teeth as Tariq rattled in fury. “Now they rape the women of the Douri tribe. When will they come for our women?”

Abu Ahmet stood and took Tariq’s hand. He gingerly turned Tariq away from Sheikh Majid. “Brothers, we fight beside al-Qaeda against the crusaders. They are our allies, and they will never insult us as they did the Douris. The Douri tribe is weak. Let them stay weak, and we will take their land when they flee back to Baghdad. Don’t forget that Saddam gave them our land during the war with Iran. Our land! To hell with the Douris!”

Guttural cheers met Abu Ahmet’s curse.

Sheikh Majid raised his voice. “Thank you, Tariq. The death of the girl is regrettable but not our concern.” He stood and pulled the slack of his robe into his hand. He glanced out the window as twilight grew on the horizon. “Return home. The crusaders will arrest anyone they find on the street after dark. Remember, we had no involvement in the kidnapping.”

Abdullah watched in silence as Theeb and several of the younger fighting men coalesced around Abu Ahmet, who gave them whispered and terse instructions. Older men of the tribe fawned over Majid, no doubt asking for the tribe’s money and influence in more petty matters.

No one spoke with Abdullah. Abdullah knew something as petty as jealousy should be beneath him. But jealousy burned in his heart as the tribe looked to Abu Ahmet for leadership on the battlefield and his father for leadership of the tribe. Abdullah had nothing to offer and nothing to lead, at least not yet.

A single padlock on a frayed and splintered door locked the squad bay door. Most of the smaller patrol bases didn’t bother locking the doors of the mass troop bays. Thievery was impractical, since the senior noncoms could turn the base inside out within hours to find any stolen items. A simple “Don’t Touch” attitude for the base’s sixty-three and dwindling Soldiers kept barracks thievery to a minimum.

Sergeant First Class Young added the padlock to the squad bay door soon after the ambush once it was clear that none of the nine Soldiers who had lived in that room were coming back. With the sudden loss of so many, the lock kept the material reminder of the occupants hidden, as though a cheap lock could contain fresh ghosts. A comic drawing of a top-heavy bodybuilder over the words “Rock Squad” adorned the door. Captain Shelton peeled the picture from the door and held it for a moment. He rubbed the edge between his thumb and forefinger for a moment, a decision brewing behind his eyes.

“Burn bag,” he said as he handed it to Kovalenko. The young lieutenant dutifully stuffed the paper into an empty black garbage bag. Collecting the personal effects of the dead was a duty for the chain of command. Rock Squad’s platoon leader, Lieutenant Oberth, had been dead for weeks. The platoon sergeant had died in the attack that emptied the bay.

Shelton stepped aside as Young searched his key ring. The ring had dozens of keys, numbers, and letter combinations scrawled onto bits of packing tape adorned to each key. The men of Dragon Company joked that they’d starve and start throwing rocks at
hajji
if that key ring was ever lost. Common areas would always unlock, but anything on a hand receipt was locked at all times. That included the mess hall stores and ammo bunker.

Young was an older Cajun man with a salt-and-pepper moustache that was far too large for army regulations. Shelton never chided his former platoon sergeant, and now acting first sergeant, for the moustache. The company ran so smoothly that Shelton spent his time fighting the enemy, not his company; he couldn’t ask for more.

Young opened the padlock and pushed the door open.

Shelton stepped in and turned on the lights; a single bank of fluorescent lights cracked and snapped on, which were inadequate for the room but better than nothing. The squad bay wasn’t too far removed from basic training. Dual rows of plywood bunks with thin foam mattresses lined each wall. A heap of duffel bags and standard-issue, large backpacks straddled the head of each bunk, bookended by a large, black plastic trunk. Shelton walked to the nearest bunk and opened the trunk.

“OK, this is…PFC Fernandez.” Shelton pulled out a handful of magazines as Young filled in the property transfer form with Fernandez’s information. All his worldly goods would go back to the family, and a proper accounting was essential. Shelton flipped through the magazines: bikini magazines sold at the PX and a few racier magazines that were strictly forbidden in Iraq. Shelton tossed the magazines in the trash bag.

He rifled through the box, handing magazines filled with bullets to Kovalenko; those stayed with the company. He tossed vacuum-sealed food packets from field rations into the garbage bag. Nothing perishable could go back to the States. Why Fernandez had a substantial stash of lemony poppy cakes would remain a mystery.

Shelton glanced through a photo album—the young man with family at a summer barbecue, probably just before the deployment; Fernandez with a toddler perched on each knee; him with a young woman at a bar. Him hugging a different young woman, their cheeks pressed together as they smiled for the camera. “Was Fernandez married? Engaged?” Shelton asked.

“No, sir. Has his mother listed as next of kin,” Young said. His Cajun accent came out on his last word.

Shelton thought for a moment, then tossed the photos of Fernandez with the women. Such photos could lead to painful questions for the family. Shelton went back to the trunk, calling out numbers and a description of everything Fernandez had brought to the war: socks, multiknife tools, gaudy paperbacks featuring space knights locked in mortal combat with muscle-bound and green-skinned barbaric foes.

Shelton stopped when he felt something hard and round inside a sock. He teased a large coin from inside. The coin was larger than a half dollar and made of bronze; the raised seal of a dragon was on one side, the battalion crest on the other. It was a unit challenge coin. Shelton had had dozens made before he took command; he awarded them as an attaboy whenever one of his Soldiers accomplished something notable but not notable enough for a medal.

“I gave this to him…It was bayonet day, right, Sergeant Young?”

“Yes, sir. Fernandez was the company champion after the pit fight.” Young nodded slowly.

Shelton remembered that a beat-up and exhausted Fernandez had ripped his football helmet off and spat out his mouth guard only to let loose a string of expletives after beating the piss out of the sergeant with a pugil stick in Green Platoon. Shelton had declared Fernandez the victor of the single-elimination tournament and slipped him the coin during a congratulatory handshake. Shelton remembered Fernandez’s pride beaming beneath a sheen of sweat and still clearing acne.

Shelton returned the coin to the sock and returned them both to the footlocker. He reminded himself to include the story behind the coin when he wrote the condolence letter to Fernandez’s family.

They continued cataloging Fernandez’s worldly goods, separating out anything that was Army’s property. Shelton and Kovalenko signed off on the inventory sheet, then taped Fernandez’s footlocker shut with thick silver tape. One down.

Shelton looked down the aisle; six more bunks remained. Their still life of war interrupted, awaiting order and cataloging. He handed the clipboard with a blank form to Kovalenko.

“Your turn,” Shelton said. He initially balked at Young’s suggestion that Kovalenko assist with this task. Kovalenko’s platoon was relatively unscathed; no one had been killed or even injured badly enough to warrant evacuation to the States. Young had argued that the young lieutenant might think he was invincible. Reminding Kovalenko of the consequences of his leadership might deflate a growing sense of cockiness.

Kovalenko moved to the next bunk and opened the footlocker belonging to the late Private Jericho.

It took an hour and a half to finish the inventory for the entire bay. Young had the personal effects tagged and sorted in the hallway outside the squad bay, ready for transport to mortuary affairs. He also had a sizable pile of contraband destined for the burn pit.

Young looked back into the bay. All but two of the bunks were bare. All but two had been stripped of everything that made a few feet of plywood and a mattress a home away from home. Those two bunks waited for their owners, as if they would burst back in after their mission, sweating and swearing and bitching incessantly about the heat and the Iraqis. The two bunks remained untouched for Brown and O’Neal in case they returned.

Young turned off the lights and locked the door.

The compartmentalized housing unit (CHU) Ritter shared with Joe Mattingly was a luxury resort by the standards of any Soldier in Iraq. He had his own bed with a wall locker conveniently placed to block the view of his roommate as they slept. The CHU had its own power outlets and a blessedly frigid air conditioner. Most importantly, the two-man unit was a tiny bastion of privacy and calm from the ubiquitous war.

Ritter’s bulletproof vest sat near the door, propped up by the internal armor plates. It was a newer model with an emergency release pull. One quick yank, and the vest would disassemble; a handy feature if a Soldier ever fell into a canal. The dual rack of M4 magazines had finger pulls rigged with gutted five-fifty cord. A firefight outside Al-Kut had taught him that shaving a few seconds off his reload time was a better form of life insurance than anything a television commercial offered. An eponymous Camelbak water blister was integrated into the armor, filled to bursting.

Ritter dreaded and adored his armor. The four ballistic plates were proof against insurgent bullets and blast injuries. The neck guards and groin protector defended against the errant bit of shrapnel aiming for an artery or something more sensitive. At the same time, he hated the weight compressing his spine, hated how the vest turned his torso into a bread oven, hated the loss of mobility, and hated feeling like a fat kid who couldn’t lower his arms because of the side plates. He hated the smell of dried sweat, which never left.

He opened a small backpack in the same gray, digital camouflage pattern of his uniform and armor. An extra set of socks, gloves, and an undershirt were in a plastic bag to protect against moisture and dirt. There was no underwear—combat was a strictly commando affair. Packets of ramen noodles, trail mix, and the few main meal packets of MREs he found palpable were in an outer pocket for easy access. He added a spare digital camera and a green notebook to the top of the pile. Satisfied that everything was there, he zipped the bag shut.

The air conditioner kicked over as he checked his watch; there was plenty of time before the mission. He reached under his bed, fished around the invincible sheen of dirt, and found his left boot. He placed it on his lap and yanked the laces out with his forefinger. This was the final task. When was the last time he’d done this? In the bare desert outside Najaf at that nothing-of-a-base…What was it called?

Three knocks on his door broke the reverie.

“Come in,” he said.

Lieutenant Davis opened the door and slipped inside, pushed by a gust of hot wind that polluted the CHU with ocher dust. She shut the door and looked down at the new mat of dust on the floor. “Crap, sorry about that,” she said. Her gray uniform had a light coat of the same wind-borne dust, as if the desert wanted to absorb her through additive layers. She took off her boonie cap and wiped her forehead with the underside of the brim.

“Never fails. Get out of the shower and walk straight into a sand blast,” she added with a chuckle. She looked over Ritter’s panoply as the humor left her face.

“Almost ready?” she asked.

“Just about,” he said. He pulled the bootlace from the last eyelet and fished his dog tags from beneath his shirt. He removed a single aluminum tag from the pair on the chain.

“I’m a little jealous of you and Jennifer. I’ve been here for six months, and I haven’t left the wire once. At this rate I’ll never see an Iraqi in the wild,” Davis said.

Ritter set the dog tag on his knee and looked at Davis. “Why is that important?”

Davis flapped her hands against the side of her thighs in frustration. “Because this is a war, and I’m a damn Fobbit! A pogue, a rear-echelon mother—”

“You’re none of those things, Cindy. Your job is here and vital to the mission, not outside the wire. No one thinks you’re hiding out.” The derogatory term, Fobbit, combining the word “hobbit” and the acronym “FOB,” Forward Operating Base, was a new creation of the Iraqi war. Soldiers living in the austere areas derided the Soldiers living with showers, easy Internet access, and three hot meals a day as Fobbits.

“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a combat patch and a CAB,” she said as she pointed at the Combat Action Badge pinned to the breast of Ritter’s rumpled uniform top. It was a black badge of a bayonet and a grenade surrounded by an incomplete oval wreath. Davis slapped her right shoulder, a blank Velcro patch beneath an American flag. “I’m still a slick sleeve,” she said, invoking Soldier slang for someone without a combat patch.

“The enemy decides when you earn a CAB,” Ritter said.

“How did you get…” Davis trailed off. Ritter let the faux pas slide; asking about combat awards was frowned upon, as the stories behind them were always painful and never worth bragging about.

“I…I still want to go out.” Davis’s face burned with embarrassment as she said this, her face a few shades closer to her hair color.

Ritter smiled. “Then who will juggle the drones while we’re on the objective? You’re the best in the brigade; we need you in that operations center more than we need you in a Humvee seat.”

“Yeah…I suppose you’re right.” She crossed her arms and glanced out the window down the long line of CHUs.

Ritter threaded his bootlace through a hole in the dog tag and shook the bootlace until the tag stopped halfway down the lace. He tucked the tag above the throat line and re-laced the boot. Cindy watched, her head slightly cocked to the side.

“What are you doing?”

“An old habit from the days before armored Humvees but still useful.”

“I don’t follow.”

Ritter pulled the laces tight, the dog tag barely visible beneath the laces. “There are two meanings. One is spiritual and the other is practical. The spiritual meaning you have to figure out for yourself. As for the practical, the dog tag will identify my body if my head is blown off.”

The words hung in the room as Davis’s mouth half opened and closed.

“But that won’t happen to you!” she yelled.

Ritter shrugged his shoulders and crammed his foot into the boot. “It’s not up to me.” He reached into a tiny nightstand by the head of his bed and pulled out a black marker. He handed it to Davis. “Do me a favor? Write my battle roster number and blood type on me.” Ritter hiked up his right sleeve and pointed at his deltoid.

Davis snapped the cap off. “What’s your number?”

“E-R zero four nine two, A POS.” The battle roster number was simple: the first letter of a Soldier’s first and last names and the last four numbers of his or her social security number. The code helped track injured or dead personnel as they were evacuated across the battlefield.