Youngblood (35 page)

With love and respect,

Will

There'd been a lot of questions about what had happened in the graveyard. The Big Man had found my lack of understanding of Coalition protocol “alarming,” though he blamed Captain Vrettos for that more than me. After I'd stood at attention in his office for thirty minutes, silently counting his analogies to football, the Big Man dismissed me with one last piece of counsel: “We can't save them all. I know your heart's in the right place. But as an officer, your head's got to be in the right place. Remove it from your asshole. Now.”

If nothing else, I appreciated the vividness of the order.

The intelligence officer proved more skeptical and probing than the Big Man. “I don't understand,” he kept repeating. “The Cleric is dead. Both of them. So why were you out there?”

It was the look of betrayal on Captain Vrettos' face when we returned to the outpost, though, that left spots on the soul.

As for Rana, we'd entered into an unspoken understanding that day at Camp Independence—she was a source, nothing more, who'd begged us to save her child. She'd played her role well, better than I'd played mine. I wasn't sure we'd speak again. I wasn't sure that was such a bad thing, either.

Then, a week later, Snoop woke me from a nightmare. He pressed his cell phone into my hands.

“It's her,” he said.

I stumbled into the lit hallway, not bothering to find my fleece top or boots. My watch said it was almost dawn.

“Sorry if I woke you.” Her voice sounded hoarse through the grainy connection.

“How is he?” I tried not to interrupt but couldn't help it. “Is Ahmed okay?”

“He is.” I was overwhelmed with relief. “I've kept him inside, though he says he's going out today no matter what.”

“What happened? The last—the last I saw, the medics had to strap him down, he was shaking so much.”

She clucked her tongue at the memory, and I could practically see her pacing the carpets, looking out a front window to watch the sun rise over her garden. “They gave him a shot to make him sleep, then medicine for the poison. We stayed until the night, when he woke up and could walk. Then they called a taxi. The doctors were very good.”

“I would've stayed,” I said. “I just couldn't.”

“Jack, you did so much. You did your duties, the doctors did theirs.”

Something about the way she enunciated the word “duties” made me consider just what those duties were. There'd been a time before when I'd thought those duties meant “The Mission.” Then I'd thought it meant protecting the soldiers in my platoon, from the war, from battalion, from themselves. I'd neglected those duties recently. After Ahmed's emergency ride, I was certain they'd mutiny, but the exact opposite happened: they revered me now, nicknaming me Iceberg Slim and telling other soldiers I was the only lieutenant in the entire army worth a fuck. One night, late, I'd asked Dominguez about it.

“If you're enlisted over here, you get used to doing stupid shit that doesn't make sense,” he'd said. “That was stupid, sure, but it made sense. And you did it cool, relaxed. Makes you different than most officers.”

It was nice, being admired for once.

“I wanted to stay with you all,” I said to Rana again. “But I couldn't.” The conversation felt strangely vacant, and I couldn't blame it entirely on the connection. I was about to ask when I could come visit again
when she said she needed to talk to me about something else. Something complicated.

She was right about that. Her husband had returned home the previous night demanding to know about the new American she met with, the new American who'd gotten Ahmed bitten by a viper. She'd denied everything, blaming it on gossip from jealous townspeople. Even her sons had lied, saying they wished the Americans would come and play, they'd be happier if they did. He hadn't believed them.

“I don't think we're safe with him, not anymore,” she said.

He'd left for work just before she called. She hadn't known whom else to turn to. All her close friends and family were either dead or had fled the country.

“To where?” I asked.

“Beirut,” she said. Most Iraqi refugees ended up in Jordan or Syria, but Beirut is where they all wanted to be, where she now planned to go, no matter what. She needed to get her boys away from the war that'd taken so much, away from a husband who'd taken so much, away from a home that'd taken everything. I asked how I could help.

“There's a smuggler in Ashuriyah,” she said. “A people smuggler. They say he's the best.”

His name was Yousef. He owned a falafel shop in town. “Yes,” I said. “I know who he is.”

She asked if I could ask him what it would cost to get a woman and two children to Beirut as soon as possible. We still owe her for saving us, I told myself. That's why I'll do this.

She thanked me for helping and said she needed to make her boys breakfast. Her voice scratched out with a simple good-bye. I sat there on the sandbags shivering in the early morning chill, body tingling with a thrill I couldn't define but recognized from another time and place.

I walked across the outpost to return the phone to Snoop. Our proud citadel was empty and quiet, smelling of mop water. I checked my watch. It was fifteen minutes past six. The other half of the platoon
was due back soon from their night mission. It was just a counter-IED patrol, I reminded myself, just driving roads to prove there were no roadside bombs there.

Unless they'd been doing something else.

Snoop sat in a metal folding chair outside the terps' room, a headlamp strapped to his forehead, reading a translation of C. S. Lewis'
The Screwtape Letters
.

He took his phone back. “LT, I didn't want to wake you, so I made her tell me why she was calling.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I—I hope to go, too. I need to go.”

My eyebrows arched in surprise. I'd need him to speak with Yousef.

“You don't think there's a better way for you?” I asked.

He shook his head, the beam from his head moving like an agitated lantern. “It's the only way,” he said.

I didn't think that was true, but hadn't found an alternative, either. I said we'd see what the smuggler thought. He nodded. The heavy shroud of conspiracy draped us both. I owe him, too, I thought. Maybe even more than I owe Rana.

Stomping boots echoed through the outpost, gear jangling downstairs. I went to the command post and found Captain Vrettos hunched over the radio, poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders. His eyes were even more bloodshot than usual.

I asked what was wrong.

“The
mukhtar
,” he said, choking out the words. “Dead and gone.”

B
y the time we got to the Sunni Strip, most of Fat Mukhtar had been scooped into pots and pans for burial. Belly guts hung from a palm tree like red banana clusters. An old woman was trying to dislodge them with a broomstick that didn't reach. Across the road a pair of wild dogs fought over a tibia bone wrapped in calf muscle.

While Snoop questioned the old woman, I walked around the remnants of the black Mercedes. Both the windshield and the driver's-side door had been blown apart. What remained looked like a hollowed-out clock, burnt black. The frame of the passenger seat had survived, as had the car's rear tires, perching its back in the air at an angle.

“This ain't no part-time job.” It was Dominguez, coming around the other side of the vehicle. “Whoever did this knows the craft. My guess: rocket under the driver seat. Remote-detonated.”

I followed his index finger to the void where the seat and steering wheel were supposed to be. In his own Mercedes, I thought. Which means someone who had access to the
mukhtar
had put it there. Which means an inside job. Which means . . . what?

Bowing my head, I forced myself into a moment of reflection for the dead
mukhtar
. I told myself I hoped he hadn't suffered, and probably meant it.

I turned to look down the road. The wedged dirt seemed to run straight into the sun. Somewhere down there, at the other end of the Strip, lay Yousef's falafel shack and, potentially, an answer to Rana's problems. That'd have to wait, though.

Snoop joined us at the car, the old woman heading to her house to fetch crates for a tall soldier to stand on.

“Happened about forty minutes ago,” Snoop said. “Big boom, woke
the whole neighborhood. She say if we got here twenty minutes ago, we could've helped get the bigger parts.”

Dominguez laughed, then apologized for laughing.

“Any idea who might've done it?” I asked.

“No,” Snoop continued. “But she say the Sahwa guards disappeared during the night. They should be right there, at the intersection.”

So it had been an inside job. Which narrowed it down to . . . eighty, ninety people? The real question was who'd paid the emplacer, and why. I walked down the dusty yellow Strip and channeled my inner Irish beat cop. If not who or why, I thought, how about where? Ten feet in front of the Mercedes, I took a knee and looked over the area. Remote-detonated meant close, but not too close—no one would be stupid enough to blow up a
mukhtar
right in front of their own house.

Nothing made sense. I rubbed my eyes, and my nostrils flared. Then I stopped looking in front of me and started looking sideways at things, studying a small constellation of huts north of the Strip, on a crooked hill.

“There.” I pointed. “That's where I'd do it. Whatcha think, Sergeant?”

Dominguez walked up beside me and squinted his eyes. “Hmm,” he said. Then, “Not bad, Iceberg Slim. Not bad at all.”

I snorted and looked behind us. The victorious dog gnawed on its trophy, having already torn through the meat. Doc Cork was steadying Washington, who was on his tiptoes on stacked crates to knock down the flesh slop from the palm, the old Iraqi woman shouting instructions in Arabic.

This is it, I thought. The Suck.

I left Washington in charge of the bomb site and walked up and around the hillside. A scratchy wind pushed against us. We moved in a diamond, Dominguez in the lead, then Snoop and me, then Doc Cork. Doc Cork was whining about getting stomach bits on him. I asked him to stop.

“Sorry, LT,” he said. “It's just weird. We were at his place last week, eating falafels with his guards.”

I nodded, wondering where my horror for things like disintegrated men had gone. There was just a nothingness, an acknowledgment of fact. Then Dominguez brought up the possibility of a house-borne IED in one of the huts.

We searched the huts with jaded efficiency. The first two were the same act from the same tired play: no one knew anything, no one had seen anything. They'd learned long ago to stay inside when explosions happened. At the third hut, though, after we'd flipped up mattresses and turned over hampers, the mother pulled aside Snoop. She had a long, narrow mouth and eyes that kept darting to the kitchen window.

“She say to look in the side of her yard,” Snoop said. “She saw the little girl next door throw something this morning. She say her family has nothing to do with it.”

We moved outside to the side yard. In a mound of dry tumbleweed, I glimpsed a black box with a bright white button that ran up it like a skunk stripe. I reached in and pulled out a garage door opener.

“Bingo,” Dominguez said. “The detonator. Think she's lying?”

I shook my head and pointed to the last hut, a small mud house with red bars on the windows and a flat roof. The five of us surrounded it in a horseshoe, and I knocked on the door.

The door opened in a low groan and Alia stood there, fierce chestnut eyes tucked under a black head scarf, her stout frame blocking the entrance. Snoop's mouth fell wide open. I said hello.

On the inside, the three-room hut was nicer than those around it; all the furniture, from the kitchen cabinets to the dining table to the dressers, was a matching beech wood. A large flat-screen had been mounted in the main room. Dust sat in corners and under furniture, and clothes and pillows sat in cluttered piles, a far cry from Rana's pristine home. I smelled old food in the kitchen, spotting withered dishrags. Through it all, an old man in a wheelchair watched from the corner with a glassy stare.

“How'd you afford the television?” I asked.

“My nephew's,” Alia said. “Bought it for his grandfather with Sahwa pay.”

My soldiers roused the nephew from bed and pushed him into the main room. Sleepy and tense, he shared his aunt's dumpy build, and a bald patch marked the crown of his head. I tapped at a framed photograph that showed the teenager standing back-to-back with a young girl, their hands formed into finger guns, each striking a James Bond pose. I asked where the little one was.

“School,” Alia said. “Of course.”

I questioned Alia and her nephew separately. She had the day off from work. He'd left his Sahwa post the day prior, and wasn't due back until the afternoon. Of course she'd heard the explosion. He'd slept through it, but his aunt had woken him up about it. She said the Sahwa guards should've been at the Sunni Strip intersection. He said the same. She didn't know the names of the men on the Sahwa night shift. He said the same. She didn't know anything about Fat Mukhtar, she was just a cleaning woman. The
mukhtar
had been his boss' boss. Though he didn't know anyone who wanted the man dead, maybe he'd been driving drunk again and that was what had caused the accident?

I told him that seemed unlikely.

“Lots of things happening at night,” Dominguez said. He was looking directly at me, puffing out his cheeks one at a time. “Still.”

I tried to keep my response flat. “Not for long.” Somewhere between the mosque and the cemetery, I'd finally decided to do something about the other part of the platoon. Something.