By the time Roddam had finished speaking, they were convinced, all of them, even Kramer, because Roddam had a quiet, serious way about him. They told him they were in, and Roddam left to arrange the details. They were his creatures now.
He had forgotten what it was like to be drunk. Back home, a six-pack would barely have helped him to get a buzz on but here, cut off from alcohol for months, his mouth always dry, his body always warm, it was as if he had knocked back a week’s worth of production from the Coors brewery. His head hurt the next day, but he was still aware of the promise that they’d made. He was just glad that they were going out in the Stryker and not in some makeweight meat wagon, even as he began to have doubts about what it was they were doing. The night before, with a couple of beers under his belt, and not enough food in his belly, he’d been all gung ho like the others, but now the reality of their situation was impacting upon him. On a regular ‘movement to contact’ mission, the new, kinder name for ‘search and destroy,’ the little FBCB2 screen behind the TC’s hatch would start displaying red triangles once the enemy was located, and that bitch’s voice, both lovely and appalling, would kick in to announce that there was an enemy in the area, but they’d be flying blind and alone on this one.
Tobias treated it like a regular patrol: he patted each of them down to make sure that they all had a CamelBak of water; gloves; pads; a clean, oiled weapon; and fresh batteries in the NODs, the night vision goggles. They’d all carried out their own precombat inspection, and they had the OP order in their heads, but, whatever his flaws, Tobias was a stickler for ensuring that everybody knew his appointed task, and had the proper equipment to carry it out. Roddam watched without speaking, uncomfortable in his Kevlar. He was nervous, and kept looking at his watch. Tobias checked the extra ammo for the .50 cal strapped to the right side of the Stryker. It was hard to get to in a firefight, but there was nowhere else to put it, and better to have it out there than not to have it at all. After the check, they performed their own intimate motions, touching medals, crosses, pictures of their families. Whatever routines had kept them alive in the past, they made sure to maintain. All soldiers were superstitious. It came with the territory.
It was Sunday evening, and the sun was going down, when they rolled out. They all had good food in their bellies, because the best food was always served on Sundays, but they’d skipped the coffee. There was enough adrenaline coursing before a raid. He remembered the sound his boots made on the dust, the grains of sand compacting beneath the sole, the solidity of the ground and the power of his legs, and then the hollow echo from the floor of the Stryker as he stepped to his seat. Such a simple act, the placing of one foot before the other. Gone now. All gone.
The warehouse was in Al-Adhamiya, the old quarter of Baghdad, a Sunni stronghold. They rolled down narrow alleyways custom built for ambushes, kerosene lamps burning in the windows of the houses as they passed, but not a single figure to be seen on the streets. Two blocks from the target, all lights disappeared, and there was only a half moon above them to gild the buildings with silver and differentiate their lineaments from the blackness above and below.
They advanced the last one hundred feet on foot. There were two entrances to the warehouse, which looked more modern than the buildings that surrounded it and was entirely dark inside: one door to the south, at the rear, and the other on the western wall. There were two small windows at ground level, protected by bars, and so thick with dust and grime that it was impossible to see through the glass. The doors were reinforced steel, but they blew the locks with C4 and came in hard and fast. Through the NODs, he saw figures moving, weapons being raised, and even as he fired he thought: something about this is not right. How can we have taken them by surprise? If a fly lands in Al-Adhamiya, someone runs to tell a spider.
One down. Two. He heard a cry of ‘Get some!’ to his left, a voice that he both recognized and did not recognize, a voice transformed by the fury and confusion of combat. A television blared, its screen almost blindingly bright through the goggles, and then the screen exploded and went dark. He heard Tobias shouting ‘Cease fire!’ and it was over. Over almost as soon as it had begun.
They searched the building, and found no other haji. Three were dead, and one was dying. Tobias stood over him while the perimeter was secured, and he thought that he heard words exchanged between them. The squad flipped their goggles as flashlights bounced around the walls, revealing crates and cardboard boxes and odd shapes wrapped in linen. The dying haji’s pupils were dilated, and he was smiling and singing softly to himself.
‘He’s high,’ said Tobias. ‘Artane, probably.’
Artane was an antipsychotic used to treat Parkinson’s disease, but was popular with the younger insurgents. In Baghdad, it was part of the pharmacopia available at places like the Babb al-Sharq, the Eastern Gate. It left the user with a feeling of euphoria and a sense of invulnerability. The haji’s voice rose in prayer, and then there was a single shot as Tobias finished him off. There would be no policing of the dead tonight, no bagging of the bodies to be dropped off at the nearest police station. They would stay where they had fallen.
The dead haji all wore black headbands, the mark of shaheed, of martyrs. He mentioned it to Tobias, but Tobias did not appear interested.
‘So what?’ he said. ‘If they wanted to be martyrs, then they got their wish.’
Tobias didn’t understand. They were waiting for us, he wanted to say, but they barely fought back. If they’d wanted to, they could have taken us in the street, where we were vulnerable, but they didn’t. They let us come to them, and then they let us kill them.
Roddam joined them, speaking on a satellite phone. Minutes later, they heard rumbles and saw lights, and a Buffalo armored vehicle appeared outside. Lord knew how they’d managed to get it down those streets, but somehow they had. It was closely followed by a single Humvee. He didn’t recognize the four men who drove the vehicles. Later, he would learn that they were National Guardsmen, two from Calais, the other two from somewhere in the ass end of the County. More Mainers, more men who owed Tobias a favor. Three never made it home. The fourth was still trying to make his new arms work.
They rolled two pneumatic lifters out of the Buffalo, and started moving the heavier crates out of the warehouse. Tobias formed four of the squad into a line, and they piled the smaller items in the Hummer, and the larger ones into the Buffalo. It took four hours. In all that time, nobody approached the warehouse, and they were allowed to depart Al-Adhamiya unhindered. Along the way, they picked up two teams of snipers. It wasn’t unusual: that was how the system worked. Snipers – Delta, Blackwater, Rangers, SEALS, Marines – would be attached to an infantry unit on a cordon-and-search mission. When the unit left, the snipers would stay and go to ground. Later, a unit would return and pick up the snipers. In this case, he knew that the snipers’ mission had been arranged by Roddam, and only to provide cover for the raid on the warehouse, because their squad had dropped off both teams earlier in the week.
There should have been gunfire, he whispered to himself. They should have been challenged. It made no sense. None of it made any sense.
But it didn’t have to, because they were rich.
Even now, the scale of what Roddam managed to pull off astonished him, but then Roddam was smart: he knew how to exploit the chaos of war, and Iraq was chaos squared. What mattered was what was being brought into the country, not what was being shipped out: half of what they had seized at the warehouse was flown to Canada, sometimes via the US, in otherwise empty planes returning to stock up on more overpriced equipment for the war effort. Larger items were shipped through Jordan, and onward by sea. Where necessary, bribes were paid, but not in the US or Canada. Even without Roddam’s CIA contacts to smooth the way, Iraq was a gold-mine for contractors. Equipment was needed yesterday, at any price, and nobody wanted to be accused of interfering with the war effort by quibbling over paperwork.
Over the months that followed, they all began to drift home, some more intact then others. They handed over their weapons, filled out their medical questionnaires on PalmPilots, none of them ’fessing up to any psychological issues, not then, which made the army happy. They all listened to the same speech from the battalion commander, advising them not to hit their wives and girlfriends when they got home, or words to that effect, and about how the army would welcome them back with open arms, a bunch of flowers, and forty virgins from the southern states should they choose to return.
Or words to that effect.
Then Kuwait, then Frankfurt, passing over Bangor, Maine, on their way to McCord AFB, then back to Bangor again, and home.
All except him, because by then his legs were ruined. He took a different route: a Black Hawk medevac to the CASH in the Green Zone, where he was stabilized before transfer to the trauma center at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Frankfurt, where they performed the amputations. Landstuhl to Ramstein, Ramstein to Andrews AFB on a C-141 Starlifter, men stacked like kindling in the center of the plane, like captives on a slave ship, six inches separating each man from the man above him, the smell of blood and urine sickening, even through the fog of medication, the noise of the aircraft deafening despite the earplugs. Andrews to Walter Reed. The hell of occupational therapy; the attempts to fit prostheses, ultimately abandoned because of the pain they caused him, and he’d had enough of pain.
Then the return to Maine, and the arguments with Tobias. He’d be looked after, Tobias told him; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut. But he wasn’t concerned solely about himself. There had been an agreement: the money would be used to help their brothers-and sisters-in-arms, the ones who were injured, the ones who had lost so much. Tobias said that had changed. He wasn’t going to police the consciences of others. They could give what they wanted. They all could. It was complicated. They had to be careful. Jandreau didn’t understand.
And suddenly they started dying. It was Kramer who told him about the box, Kramer who discussed the nightmares he was having, Kramer who led him to delve into the dark corners of Sumerian mythology, but it wasn’t until just after Damien Patchett died that he found out the truth about Roddam. Roddam was dead. He had been found in the IRIS office in Concord one week after Tobias and Bacci returned home, the first of the men involved in the Al-Adhamiya raid to do so. It had passed the rest of them by, if any of them had even cared, because Roddam wasn’t his real name: it was Nailon, Jack Nailon. He’d fallen asleep on the couch in his office with a lit cigar in an ashtray on the couch arm, and with too much whiskey in his system and on his clothes. He had burned to death, they said.
Except that Roddam, or Nailon, or whatever his real name was, didn’t drink. That was what he remembered from the beer night at the base, when he and Roddam had exchanged a couple of words after he had offered Roddam a beer. Roddam was a diabetic and suffered from high blood pressure. He couldn’t drink alcohol and he didn’t smoke. He didn’t know why that hadn’t come up during the investigation into Roddam’s death. Maybe, like everything else about Roddam, his medical history was uncertain, hidden. But then he recalled some of the things that Tobias had begun to say about Roddam before Tobias went home: Roddam was unreliable. Roddam wasn’t one of us. Roddam was causing trouble in Quebec. Roddam wanted a bigger cut. As though he were preparing the way for Roddam’s removal.
He’d brought up Roddam’s death after Damien’s funeral. He’d brought up lots of stuff because he was sad, and he was drunk, and he missed Mel, and he was sure going to miss Damien. If Roddam wasn’t in charge, then who was? Tobias was classic NCO material. He didn’t originate ideas, he just put them into action, and this was a complicated operation.
And Tobias had told him to keep quiet, to mind his own business, because a man in a wheelchair was vulnerable, and cripples had accidents all the time.
After that, he’d started carrying the gun under his chair.