“Those kickoffs were over in twenty seconds, max,” I said through gritted teeth. “This is going to last a lot longer.”
“Maybe,” he said, and I saw then that Paul believed we might well die in the next few minutes.
“Where’s the German?” I asked.
“Upstairs, center of the building. He’s too valuable to expose.”
We each sat at a boarded-up window and waited, staring through our firing slits like hunters in a duck blind. About twenty minutes later, as shadows slid across the street, our cook made a run for it. We knew because one of the ShieldCorp men shouted it from the kitchen.
“Dumbass,” Paul muttered, and I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the cook or the contractor. Thirty seconds later he said, “See?”
Two insurgents shoved our cook into view across the road, while keeping behind cover themselves. They shot him in the stomach first. After he screamed and fell to his knees, they stood him up straight and shot him in the face.
I felt like I was going to vomit, but I held it down.
“No chance of the Alpha team breaking through to get us?” I asked.
“I’ve been texting them,” Paul said, not taking his eyes from his slit. “But they’d have to fight their way through two roadblocks. Burning tires, RPGs, overwhelming odds. Our best bet is the Little Bird. But if I disobey Joint Task Force command, they could kick us out of Iraq for good.”
“Who gives a shit?! You’d be alive at least.”
Paul grinned. “I hear you, Goose. Let me see if I can get us some help breaching a roadblock.”
Goddamn it, I thought angrily. We’re in the fucking Alamo, and this idiot’s trying to save his business—
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Paul said in a softer voice, alternating between his cell phone screen and his firing port. “Jet’s father was from this part of the world. Yet we’re over here fighting, maybe dying, and she’s back in Bienville, safe as houses.”
Bringing up Jet should have been awkward, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
“So what the fuck are we doing here?” I asked.
Paul laughed. “I’m making a buck. You’re telling a story about me making a buck. Any questions deeper than that, I don’t ask. That’s your department.”
“I hope I live to answer them.”
He looked over at me then, without guile or intent. “Let’s hope one of us makes it back. If not, Jet’ll have to start over again with God knows what loser.”
The second wave came as Paul predicted, when the whole street had fallen under the shadow of oncoming night. Team Bravo knocked down twenty more Iraqis in the first two minutes, but the hajis—as the ShieldCorp guys called the insurgents—were getting smarter about cover. They’d also brought up some real shooters this time. Ten minutes into the second fight, we lost two guys almost simultaneously. One had a sucking chest wound; the other caught a 7.62 round in the forehead. After that, Paul had to take over one of the dead guys’ positions, leaving me to cover our room alone. Before he left, he drew a small automatic pistol from an ankle holster and passed it to me.
“You know what that’s for,” he said in a taut voice.
“No way,” I told him.
“Goose.” He looked hard into my eyes. “A .380 round beats the shit out of having your head sawed off and your parents watching it later.” He squeezed my shoulder. “I love you, brother.”
I nodded, my throat sealed shut with fear.
Then he left me.
In that moment, the terror of every nightmare I’d ever had came to vivid life. I was utterly alone, surrounded by men bent on killing me—or, worse, hurting me very badly, then killing me, and doing it all on camera. Worst of all, I wasn’t trained for the situation. I had only the vaguest notion of how to defend myself. My only consolation was that a lot of the insurgents outside probably knew less about guns than I did.
I was visualizing the Little Bird landing on our roof like the angel Gabriel when the hajis rolled an antiaircraft cannon into the street before our house. The mere sight of its gaping muzzle loosened my anal sphincter. What remained of our shelter could not possibly stand against that weapon.
The first round from the cannon blasted our front door into metal splinters, announcing the terminal phase of the battle. A Bravo sniper on the roof killed several hajis in succession as they manned the gun, but the fourth gunner finally obliterated our sharpshooters. Then the cannon opened up in earnest. When the front wall had so many holes in it that collapse seemed imminent, the insurgents charged across the street.
At that moment, my conscious mind departed the proceedings. With weird detachment I watched my right thumb flip the selector switch to auto. Then I shoved my muzzle back through the slit and emptied a clip into the mass of charging bodies. For three dilated seconds the rifle shuddered against my shoulder. Blood and tissue exploded into the air, men screamed like women, and I saw my fire stagger the charge. Then my clip ran dry. The insurgents recovered, and they kept coming.
Whoever was still alive on our upper floor kept knocking men down, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Seeing an extra magazine on the floor at my feet, I ejected the clip and reached for it. Then something slammed into the side of my head, and the lights went out.
I woke up to find myself lying on the table we had eaten at, with four wild-eyed Iraqis standing over me. I didn’t know how much time had passed, and no one would tell me. So far as I could tell, only one spoke any English, and all he would say was that my comrades were dead. When I protested that I was a journalist, they laughed and held up the M4 I’d used against them. A haze of unreality descended over me. My limbs went numb. My heart slammed against my sternum, yet I felt disconnected from my body. I don’t know if my blood pressure was crashing or at stroke level, but I remember thinking, If they cut my throat, it’s going to spurt ten feet.
I wanted to ask if Paul was really dead, but it seemed pointless. They didn’t know who Paul was. And if he was alive, admitting I cared about him couldn’t possibly help either of us. One of the Iraqis was shouting into his cell phone, and I got the idea that he meant to deliver me to someone higher up the chain. Or maybe that’s what he was being ordered to do, while he preferred to kill me on the spot and film it with the camcorder one of his buddies had aimed at me.
They went back and forth about this for five minutes, and during that time I pissed myself. I don’t like admitting that. I felt strangely ashamed in the moment. I remember thinking that John Wayne and Robert Mitchum never pissed themselves in this kind of situation. At least not in the movies. I felt I was regressing to infancy in the presence of men who already despised me. I suppose I was. I thought of my mother and how she would mourn me, her second son, who had also died before his time. I also wondered what my father would feel, hearing of my death while on assignment. Would he finally respect me? For dying in pursuit of our shared profession?
I never found out.
As I lay there grieving the brief flicker of warmth and light that had been my mortal existence, Paul and an ex-Ranger named Gary Inman hurled two flash-bang grenades into the room, blinding and deafening everyone in it. Five seconds later, every man but me had been shot through the head.
“CANYOUWALK?” Paul shouted in my ear.
“Paul?” I blubbered, tears streaming from my eyes.
He jerked me to my feet. “Come on, Goose! MOVE!”
“Where?” I gasped, staggering like a blind drunk.