"Yes, but, well…you don't just wave 'em in now, for Christ's sake! You still gotta get their papers and check the cars. Maybe you get some Iraqis down here, at least a translator, somebody who can speak Arabic. You get your bomb-sniffing dogs…"
Gurung's expression changed in the middle of the tirade. His focus went to someplace out over Tucker's shoulder and then suddenly he was walking away across the parade ground to intercept Jack Allstrong, who was jogging up. The two men stopped maybe twenty yards from where Tucker stood. After a short exchange of words, Allstrong put a quick, reassuring hand on Gurung's shoulder and then went past him as he strode toward the gate.
At this moment, Tucker, still in the middle of the road, holding up the flow of traffic, got another blast from the horn of the car in front of him. By now truly enraged, he put his hand onto his sidearm and pointed the index finger of his other hand at the car's driver-the warning explicit and eloquent.
Behind him, he heard Allstrong's relaxed voice. "Maybe you want to step out of the way and let my men do their job, Major."
Tucker whirled on him. "How can they do their job and question these people when they don't speak the language?" he said. Without pause, he went on, pointing to the commando team, now hard up against the back of one of the buildings. "But before anything else, you've got to call those men off. They can't conduct an offensive sweep."
Allstrong glanced over to them. "We were being fired on, Major. It's defensive. We have to protect ourselves, and we have every right to."
"Your men here tell me that nothing's been hit. Which makes me doubt there was much of an attack."
Allstrong pulled himself up to his full height, his usually affable expression suddenly harsh. "Maybe you missed the mortar attacks last month, Major, that punched holes as big as Volkswagens into the runways out here and killed four of my workers and wounded twenty more. Or the rifle fire that shot my office up and, oh yeah, killed another two of my guys." It was Allstrong's turn to point to the low-lying buildings. "That neighborhood over there is a breeding ground for attacks on this airport, and it's my job to stop them."
Tucker stuck his chin out. "There's no attack going on now, Allstrong. You either call your men back or I swear to God I'll personally intervene with Calliston and even your buddy Ramsdale to cut your funding off. We don't need wildcat contractors playing cowboys out here. You play by the rules or you don't play at all."
By this time, Gurung had come up near them. Allstrong glanced again at his commandos, then nodded to his employee. "Radio them to come on back in," he said. "Fight's over for today." Then, back to Tucker, "But that isn't why you came out here."
"No, it's not. I came here to inspect what our money's being used for. You realize that your gate guards here don't speak Arabic? How are they supposed to get information from these drivers when they don't speak the language?"
Allstrong shook his head. "These men are British-trained Gurkha guards, Major, the pride of Nepal. They're completely capable of handling this mission. I've tried hiring locals a few times and you know what happens? They either steal my shit or they don't show up, or both. They're afraid if they take a job with me, their families will get killed, and they're not all wrong. My guys are thorough and they get the job done. If it's a little slower than American standards, well, excuse me all to hell, but we're in a war here."
"What about the dogs? The bomb-sniffing dogs?"
"What about them? We're still training them. I've got sixty trainers and a hundred dogs working full-time out behind the terminals. When they're ready, I'll put 'em all to work. Meanwhile, again, I go with my guys."
"I'm going to want to see your kennels. And your fleet of trucks and cars that we've coughed up the money for. In fact, you can just look on my visit here today as an unannounced, informal audit to see if we've got to come back with a full-on inspection. I've got preapproval both from Calliston and the Inspector General of the Army."
"Good for you." Allstrong backed away a step and crossed his arms over his chest. "But I'm afraid I can't allow you inside the compound."
"The hell you can't."
"You watch me, Major. You're forgetting that I don't work for the Army. My contract is with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Jerry Bremer, through Kevin Ramsdale. I don't hear a Calliston in there, do you? Or a Tucker. And my bosses are happy enough with the job I'm doing that I'm getting almost more work than I can keep up with. So, look. You want to check up on me, clear it with Ramsdale. I've got nothing to hide, but I'm not showing my books to anybody who doesn't have permission to see them. So thanks all to hell for your interest, Major, but I'm afraid this trip's going to turn out to be a waste of your time." He turned to his worker. "Mr. Gurung, Major Tucker is not to enter the compound today or any other day without my permission. Is that clear?"
Gurung nodded. "Yes, sir."
Tucker glared at Allstrong. "I'm going to go to Ramsdale, and even Bremer if I have to," he said. "If I were you, Allstrong, I'd get my books in order. I'm going to be back with all the authority I need. You just wait."
"I'll look forward to it. Meanwhile, you have a nice drive back to Baghdad, Major. And keep your head down." Allstrong broke his trademark smile. "You never know."
Ron Nolan had arrived back in the compound earlier that same day, and now he and Evan Scholler sat on the steps to the chow trailer. A few minutes of natural sunlight remained in the hot August evening. Dust from the afternoon winds hung in the air, smearing it yellowish-brown.
"Dude," Nolan said. "I'm telling you. She's moved on. You ought to do the same."
Evan didn't argue with Nolan this time about whether or not he'd have another Budweiser. He'd already had three-cans this time, not bottles. He popped the top and lifted the next cold one to his lips. He wiped foam from his lips. "Was there anybody else?"
"What? You mean with her? Did I see anybody? Haven't we been through this already? No." Nolan took a pull from his can. "But we're talking about a total time in her presence of about three minutes, all of it at the door to her apartment trying to get her to just take the damn letter. If there was some guy inside with her, I didn't see him."
"So maybe-"
But Nolan cut him off. "Maybe nothing, Evan, don't do this to yourself. You had to see her face-great face, by the way, so I know where you're coming from and you've got my sympathy-but if you'd seen her face you wouldn't have any doubts. She didn't want anything to do with you or that letter. You want to hear it again? She says, 'I'm not going to read it.' And I go, 'You don't have to read it, but I promised Evan I'd get you to take it from my hands. You can do that, can't you?' So she goes, 'I'm just going to throw it away.' And I go, 'That's your call, but I've got to give this to you.' So she takes it, says thanks, and looking straight into my eyes, she rips the envelope in half."
Evan sipped beer and blew out a breath. "Fuckin'-A."
"Right. I agree, it's a bitch. But, hey, the good news is you don't have to wonder anymore." Nolan hesitated, sipped his beer, shot a sideways glance across the steps. "I don't know if you want to hear this, my friend, but I've got to tell you or you'll never know. She put a move on me too." Holding out a restraining hand, Nolan hurried on. "Nothing I couldn't handle and I very reluctantly gave her a pass, but if you needed any more certainty…"
"No, that ought to cover it."
"I hear you. But you know, give me certainty anytime. I can deal with that any day over not knowing."
"Maybe you're right."
"Damn straight I am."
Evan looked over at him. "She really came on to you?"
Nolan nodded, solemn. "And I didn't get the impression it was the only time since you've been gone. The girl's a stone fox, Ev. You think she's sitting home alone nights watching TV? Come on, she's human, life's short, and she's got a life back there. This isn't rocket science. You guys broke up before you came here. It's over. Accept it."
Evan hung his head. He couldn't seem to muster the strength to lift it up.
Shit, Nolan was thinking. Maybe the guy's not going to get over her. That possibility hadn't occurred to him. Nolan had told the small lie about Tara ripping up the envelope because he thought it made for a convincing story, brought the finality of Evan and Tara's breakup a bit closer to home. But now he saw that Evan might not accept it. He might keep trying to reach her again, might find out what had gone on in Redwood City, might even manage to snag Tara back away from him.
Nolan couldn't let that happen. He wanted Tara. He'd gotten her and he intended to keep her until he didn't want her anymore, which might be a very long time. However, Evan's reaction caught him off balance; now he'd simply have to adjust. Fine-tune the mission. Keep him away from her.
All was fair in warfare anyway. And the old saying was right: in love, the same thing. You needed to be willing and able to adjust to the unexpected.
Evan Scholler was stationed in a dangerous place, after all, where anything might happen to him. Nolan could tweak the odds just a bit, give Evan a little something else to deal with instead of Tara Wheatley.
He reached over and hit Evan's arm, hard but friendly. "You know what you need, dude? You need something to take your mind off all this, that's all."
"And that's always an easy call here at party central."
"Hey, there's things to do here. You just got to know where to look."
"Right."
"You doubt me?"
For an answer, Evan drank beer.
"The man doubts me." Nolan shook his head in disbelief. "Dude," he said. "Put your beer down. Come with me."
Evan took a beat, then tipped his can up, emptying the contents into his mouth. When he finished, he got to his feet. "Where we goin'?"
"Smoke-check party," Nolan said.
"What's that?"
"Smoke-check the Muj. You'll love it."
The spy for Jack Allstrong in the airport's adjoining neighborhood was an educated ex-Republican Guard officer, a Sunni named Ahmad Jassim Mohammed. No one knew the exact game he was playing, and this was no doubt the way Ahmad preferred things, but the pretense was that he had accepted the new, post-Saddam status quo and wanted to work with America and its allies to help rebuild his country. He'd gotten connected to Allstrong during the July mortar attacks on the airport, when under the guise of offering his services as an interpreter, he'd instead provided five thousand dollars' worth of information that had proved valuable in identifying several target houses in the airport's neighboring slum that had contained large caches of weapons, mortars, and other explosives.
Though no one, least of all Jack Allstrong, ruled out the possibility that Ahmad might in fact be a spy checking out airport conditions for the insurgents, and though the consensus among Nolan and the other executives at Allstrong was that Ahmad was using the American military presence to settle vendettas with his personal enemies among his former Republican Guard colleagues, the fact remained that his information tended to be correct. When the targets he'd provided were eliminated, the mortar attacks on the airport had abruptly come to an end. That was about as far as Allstrong or Calliston needed to take it. Allstrong had paid Ahmad for similar information several times now, and counted on the intelligence he supplied to keep a step ahead of the insurgency just outside his perimeter. And so far it was working.
No one had expected today's attack, but Ahmad had arrived at the compound in its aftermath. Now, in the sultry early night, he sat in the front seat of one of Allstrong's convoy vehicles. Ron Nolan was driving. Evan Scholler, in black fatigues, his Kevlar vest, and with four beers in his bloodstream, stood uncomfortably manning the machine-gun platform on the vehicle's roof. Behind him in the seats, two other black-clad Gurkha commandos checked their weapons.
The party rolled out of the main gate. Off to their right, they could sense, more than see, the slumlike contours of the mud-caked domiciles of the residents. A quarter mile or so outside of the compound, the Humvee veered suddenly right and began bouncing across the no-man's-land that separated the airport from the homes. Nolan killed the regular beams, leaving only the car's running lights on.
Evan squinted ahead into the night, unable to make out many details either to the sides or ahead of them. He wished he hadn't had those beers. He wasn't drunk, but he could feel the alcohol, and though Nolan had assured him that they faced little or no danger, just an awesome adrenaline rush, he'd also insisted that Evan wear his bulletproof vest, as all the others had done.
Evan thought he might in fact wind up needing all of his faculties, and couldn't shake a keen awareness that his reflexes might not be there for him in a pinch. So his mouth was dry, his palms sweaty, his head light. He was alone up here, half-exposed. Behind him in the car, he heard nothing-and that didn't help his nerves either.
What the hell was he doing?
In another minute, they'd entered the town itself. As they'd approached, Evan thought for an instant that the car might just try to crash through one of the yards, but evidently Ahmad knew where he was directing them. Suddenly they were in a street so narrow it barely fit them. It was lit only by the lights from within the houses, but the place wasn't dead by any means. The locals were outside smoking, talking-their Humvee picked up some kids, running along beside the car, whistling, calling out for food or candy.
The foot traffic forced them to slow down. Nolan honked from time to time, never stopping, forcing his way ahead, making the populace move out of his way. Evan, sweating heavily now, kept his hands gripped tightly on the handles of his machine gun, even as he heard Nolan call up to him. "Stay cool, dude. Nothing happening here. We're not there yet."
They turned left, then right, then left again, now down unmarked and unremarkable streets, into more of what looked like a marketplace area, closed up for the night, with few if any pedestrians. Nolan accelerated through the space and entered another quarter of the suburb. People still milled about, but less of them, and with far fewer children. Nolan made another turn and pulled up to a stop at a large open space in front of what appeared to be a mosque. Here the foot traffic had all but disappeared. The only light or sound-television and music-came from a two-story dwelling at the next corner down on their left.
The passenger door opened and Ahmad got out of the car, closed the door gently, then leaned back in the window and said something to Nolan. Then he turned and ran, disappearing into another of the side streets. Nolan killed even the running lights next, and then immediately they were moving, only to stop again sixty yards along, after they'd passed the house Ahmad had pointed out to them.
This time the engine went quiet. The radio music from the house was louder down here, providing cover for whatever noise they made as Nolan and his two commandos opened their doors and got themselves and their weapons out into the street.
They all gathered now down under and just to the side of Evan's position. They'd blackened their faces and hung grenades on their vests since they'd gotten into the Humvee and these two details chilled Evan, who could barely make out anything but Nolan's teeth in the darkness. He seemed to be smiling. "I'm leaving the keys in the car," he said to Evan, "in case you need 'em. You remember how we got here, right?" A joke, even in this setting. Nolan went right on. "If you need to, hop in the driver's seat and get out any way you can. But this shouldn't be long. And, hey, remember, we're in black, but we're the good guys, for when we come out."
Then he illuminated the light on the helmet he wore, as did the other men. All of these were clearly well-rehearsed maneuvers. At a nod from Nolan, the men broke into a trot toward their target. In an instant, one stood on each side of the door of the house. Nolan took a position in front of the door and, without any warning or fanfare, opened fire with his submachine gun. This knocked the door open and Nolan kicked it and led his men in.
Immediately, bedlam ensued. Screams and yelling, shots and sporadic bursts of automatic weapons fire, then the three men assembling outside again-Evan thinking it was already over-when the night was split by a shattering explosion o
ut of the lower window. And the men rushed in again, this time into pure darkness.
Evan's knuckles tightened on the handles of his machine gun. Behind him, he heard a sound and whirled. He couldn't make the gun turn a full one-eighty, and he suddenly realized that if anyone were to come up behind him, he had no defense. Drawing his sidearm, he ducked down for a second below the backseat and peered back behind him, but there was nothing in the street. In the house across the way, the yelling and the gunfire continued-again individual shots followed by bursts of automatic weapons. Another explosion ripped through the night, this one blowing out the upstairs windows, and then suddenly all went quiet.
A few seconds later, the three men in black fatigues appeared outside the front door again. Two of them bolted back toward the car, while the third reentered the building, then emerged on a dead run just as his two colleagues got to the car. Behind him, in the house, two nearly simultaneous explosions blew out any remaining glass in the downstairs windows and halfway knocked him to the ground, but he kept running until he, too, reached the car.
By this time, Nolan was back in the driver's seat, breathing hard, starting the thing up. Over his shoulder, he yelled up at Evan. "That was the place all right. That Ahmad is okay. Must have been a dozen Muj in there, dude, maybe two hundred AKs. RPGs, you name it. But nothing that a few frag grenades couldn't cure. God, I love this work. How 'bout you? Was that fun or what? Hang on, we're rolling."
Behind him, fire and smoke were beginning to billow out of the building's windows. Evan couldn't take his eyes off the spectacle. He was vaguely aware of doors opening on the street around him, people pouring out into the night, more shouts, the screams of women. Behind them now, he heard the crack of what he imagined must be gunfire, but he saw nothing distinctly enough to consider it a target.
But then they had turned the corner and were headed back through the space in front of the mosque, then the marketplace. Evan swallowed against the dryness in his throat, his stomach knotted up inside him, his knuckles burning white on the handles of his machine gun.
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