“Grab my fucking belt and stay on my ass!”
I jammed my hand into his pants and hung on like a baby monkey clinging to its mother. The gunshots had triggered pandemonium in the house. No Iraqi was sure who was shooting or why. In the midst of this chaos, the skill set possessed by Paul and his buddy proved to be a force multiplier of astonishing lethality. I saw Paul shoot two men in the face while they tried to figure out who he was and where he’d come from. When another insurgent threw up his hands in defense, Paul shot him through his hands. Barely functioning, I hung on to Paul’s belt as he swept through the house, killing all before him.
Inman kicked open a door that led into a narrow alley I remembered from our previous life, which seemed a thousand years ago. We darted left first, but a Toyota pickup with a bed-mounted machine gun shrieked to a stop just past the opening. That armed Toyota—known as a “technical”—would back up any second to finish us off.
Paul veered right and charged down the alley. We’d almost reached the other end when the technical opened up. Heavy-caliber bullets ripped into the masonry wall to my right, and either a bullet or stone shrapnel knocked down Gary Inman.
“LEAVE HIM!” Paul shouted, after a momentary glance.
I did.
The next street was hardly more than an alley itself. Paul started left again (as though he had a specific destination), but the familiar whine of an engine told us the Toyota was coming back to head us off. Paul skidded to a stop, jerked my arm, and led me back the other way.
Twenty yards up the alley, a Honda Accord had stopped, facing us. It sat idling, headlights off, as if waiting for us to commit to a move. The street was so narrow that we couldn’t slip around the car. I tried to see through the dark windshield. A bearded man sat behind the wheel, and beside him I discerned what looked like a white hijab.
The squeal of brakes sounded behind us. The Toyota—
The driver of the Accord screamed, and the hijab beside him flared white. Then their windshield exploded in a hail of bullets. I whirled left. Paul had raised his M4 and was riddling the car. The sight of that windshield shattering into a hail of glass and blood paralyzed me.
“FOLLOW ME!” he shouted.
Paul ran right over the hood and roof of the Accord, his boots smashing dents in the holed metal, then dived onto the cobblestones beyond the trunk. I know I followed him, because I looked down through the missing windshield as I climbed over the car. Inside lay a man and woman. The man had jerked the woman into his lap to shield her with his body, but his effort had gone in vain. Both bodies were covered in bright red blood. The man’s head had been smashed wide open by a bullet.
As I leaped off the trunk, I heard a child crying behind me. I started to turn back, but Paul dragged me to the ground as the technical opened up again. While the machine gun chewed the Honda into scrap metal, we belly-crawled to the end of that alley.
Waiting in the next street like a golden chariot was the Mamba belonging to Paul’s Alpha team. Beside it a ShieldCorp contractor named Evans stood like a bored chauffeur. “Does this complete your party, sir?” he asked with a grin.
“We’re it,” Paul said. “Get the fuck out of Dodge. There’s a technical right behind us.”
“Rangers lead the way, motherfuckers!” yelled Evans, and then he shoved us inside and climbed in after us. Four ShieldCorp contractors carrying MP5 submachine guns grinned back at me.
I’ll omit the details of our escape from Ramadi. There were more casualties, but lying inside that South African armor, the only thing I wanted to know was where Paul had been during those awful minutes I was a prisoner. As it turned out, while the insurgents overran the house, Paul and Inman had climbed over the edge of the roof and dropped down into a ten-inch gap between the ShieldCorp house and the one next door. Because the walls were so close together, they’d needed no ropes. They simply wedged themselves between the two buildings and slid halfway to the ground. Before long, they picked up what was going on inside the house.
While in this stone sandwich, Paul sent out an emergency text to the Alpha team, which was parked near one of the roadblocks. Upon hearing that Paul was in imminent danger of being killed, Alpha team used RPGs and their Mamba’s machine gun to smash through the roadblock, then drove to the street Paul had named in a previous text. One thing I didn’t learn until later was that Gary Inman had wanted to run straight for the Mamba. The German engineer was already dead—killed by a random shot during the final charge—so their mission was a failure. But Paul had insisted they go back for me. In fact, another ShieldCorp guy later confided to me that Paul told Inman if he didn’t go back for me, Paul would shoot him and leave his corpse stuck between the buildings.
As dramatic as all that was, the defining moment occurred later, when I was writing about our experience. I was haunted by those Iraqis in that Accord. Why didn’t Paul just run right over the car without shooting the people inside? I wondered. But of course I knew. They could have been insurgents themselves, and Paul wasn’t going to take any chances. But why not at least fire warning shots, to back the Accord down the alley? That’s what his teams did during convoy escort duty. Again the primal voice in my head answered: If Paul had done that, we’d have been trapped on the wrong side of the Accord when the technical opened fire . . .
These justifications meant little in the dead of night when sleep escaped me. Because I was so haunted by that Iraqi child’s cry, I wrote two drafts of the chapter about my rescue. One included the Accord, the other didn’t. As the drop-dead date approached during the copyediting phase of my manuscript’s production schedule, I heard that Paul and one of his teams had gotten into some trouble, this time in the Jamhori Quarter of Ramadi, during the Second Battle of Fallujah.
Paul had a third team operating by then: Sierra Charlie. Apparently, Charlie team—with Paul along—had gotten pinned down during a protective detail, and things got very hot. Paul called in the Little Bird for evac, but the helicopter took so much fire that it had to peel off. Left on its own, the ShieldCorp unit had gone into offensive mode and shot its way out of the neighborhood. It went through some houses to do so—several contiguous structures—and civilians were killed. A fire had broken out as well, which caused more casualties.