The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  “So it’s jealousy, then,” I said.

  “You are so out on your own on this, Cooper,” Masters said, shaking her head.

  “I mean it, the green-eyed monster has you.”

  “Get over yourself, Cooper.”

  “Then tell me what you were doing outside my apartment earlier this evening. Were you spying on me—waiting to see whether I went out for a cheeseburger, or something equally heinous?”

  Masters’s arms were folded tight, protecting her. “What makes you think I was there?” she demanded.

  “Because that purple Mercedes of yours sticks out like a mandrill’s butt.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “You’re wrong. It’s all that matters. Why were you there?”

  “You’re never going to find out now, are you?”

  “Was it business or pleasure? And if it was business, whose business were you on?”

  “You are an asshole, you know that?” said Masters.

  “Look…I saw your car, and then I heard a knock on the door. I thought it was going to be you standing there when I opened it, but it wasn’t. How long were you sitting out there, asking yourself whether you’d come up or not, working up the courage?”

  “The courage to what? And stop trying to make your completely unprofessional evening’s intercourse with Ms. Va-va-va-voom out to be my fault.”

  “That’s not my intention. I’m just saying it could have turned out differently, is all.”

  Masters glared at me. “Oh, lucky me.”

  “Look, I apologize if I disappointed you, okay?”

  “Go to hell. You know what your problem is, Cooper?”

  “I have only one?”

  “You’re dishonest. You think one thing but you say something else entirely.”

  Busted. “That’s a bunch of crap,” I said defensively. Brenda, the ex, had accused me of much the same crime over the years.

  “I’m sick of playing games with you, Cooper,” said Masters. “We’re either on the same team—honest and open—or you’re on your own. Why are you so…so…closed down? You’ve been married, haven’t you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Did she cheat on you? Is that what happened?”

  If Masters was expecting me to break down and start sucking my thumb, she was going to be disappointed. “Our relationship counselor convinced me it was never going to work,” I said.

  Masters nodded smugly. It was clear she now believed she knew what made me tick. “I have one other question for you, Cooper.”

  My turn to nod.

  “What the hell is a mandrill?”

  Varvara had three blankets wrapped around her by the time Masters and I had settled on a workable cease-fire. Her teeth had stopped chattering, and she appeared dazed. Masters put an arm around her shoulders.

  “Varvara,” I said, “you have to leave here.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “No, I mean you have to leave here—Germany; Europe. Go where no one will look to find you. Use that passport. We don’t even want to know where you’re going. And this is important: When you get there, you must not use a credit card, for a while at least. Use cash only. It’s too dangerous for you here. The fire proves that, if nothing else.”

  “You’re going to arrest that woman, yes?” she asked.

  “If you mean Mrs. Scott, no. She hasn’t committed a crime, not one I’m aware of.”

  “You are wrong.”

  “There are too many questions left unanswered, Varvara. Do you have money?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can stay with me till the morning,” said Masters with that protective arm still around her shoulders, glaring at me.

  “What?” I mimed.

  “Where are you going?” Varvara asked, directing the question at me.

  “I’m off to the fun capital of the world,” I said. “Otherwise known as Baghdad.”

  NINETEEN

  I checked the time on my Seiko. It was just before midnight in D.C., a handful of minutes before 0600 at Ramstein. The sun was coming up on the fog rolling across the apron, and I had a crap that felt like a lump of cold pig iron sitting in my gut. The USAF C-130 parked on the apron, two of its propellers spinning, was my ride to Baghdad. I don’t like C-130s. There were a lot of them in Afghanistan and they bring back memories.

  The connection cut in again. General Gruyere’s throat sounded like she’d been gargling hydrochloric acid, but it could have been the poor line. Of course, Gruyere being who she was, I could easily have been right in the first instance. “Jesus wept, Cooper! Are you fucking trying to tell me Harmony Scott is lying about her own husband’s goddamn suicide?” she growled. Yeah, the line had nothing to do with it.

  “The truth is, ma’am,” I said, “I’m not sure what I believe right at the moment.”

  “Do you know who or what you’re dealing with here, son? If you’re even just a little off with this, Jefferson Cutter will peel you like a banana and roll you in rock salt.”

  I went through my reasons for going to Baghdad, which didn’t seem to impress her. But when I added Varvara’s conflicting note to the picture, Gruyere reluctantly conceded that perhaps some questions requiring answers were still outstanding. In her way, she was giving me a conditional green light—the condition being that if I fucked up, it would go badly for no one but me. So what else was new?

  The line dropped out permanently just as Masters strode through the hangar lugging a bag. “What’s that?” I asked when she drew up beside me.

  “My grandmother. What does it look like?”

  “It looks like you’re going someplace.”

  “I have movement orders for both of us. I’m coming with you. We’ll pick up weapons and armor in-country.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Okay then, let me put it another way: Fuck off,” she said.

  “I need you to stay here and—”

  “And what, darn your socks? I don’t think so. You don’t have a choice, Vin. Now, are we going, or are you staying?”

  “Excuse me, sir, ma’am. We’re good to go,” said the captain, a reed-thin man with a head shaved pink.

  I picked up my gear. “We need someone to hold the fort here,” I told Masters.

  “We’ve got Flight Lieutenant Bishop. I’ve given him a whole list of stuff to chase through, like getting a line on those Aurora Aviation people. He’s also going to be looking into some phone and bank records. Technically, he’s still on secondment to us, remember?”

  “Yeah. Okay, that’s good.”

  “It gets better,” said Masters.

  “A dentist’s coming with us?”

  “Tooth still giving you grief?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was about two thirds of the way through my supply of pills and twigs.

  Masters pouted in a show of sympathy that lasted less than a second, and moved on. “Anyway, I called into OSI before coming here. Bishop was going through his computer files and wanted to know if he should delete the copy he made of the general’s hard drive.”

  “You’re kidding? He made a copy? That’s a break and a half.”

  “Maybe not. He’s still saying the Dungeon program protecting those files is almost impregnable.”

  “But he’s going to keep trying, right?”

  Masters nodded.

  “Does anyone else know he made a copy?”

  “I asked him that. He doesn’t think so.”

  “Good. Can he do something else for us?”

  “What?”

  “Can he track down the current whereabouts of former members of Peyton’s unit? Particularly the noncoms? They’ve probably had their tour extended along with everyone else still in Iraq. It’d be helpful if we could speak to a few of those guys and find out what really happened.”

  “What about the U.S. hospital in Baghdad? Did you call?”

  “Yeah, the colonel there knows we’re coming.”

  “Good.”

  “Excuse me, s
ir, ma’am?” The captain was looking anxious. “We’re on a schedule here.”

  Back to Masters. I wasn’t keen on her coming along, for the simple reason that the two of us didn’t really need to go and hold each other’s hands. That and the fact that the capital of Iraq was still Terror Central. People were losing their lives there every day, and, as far as I knew, none of them were turning up in the lost-and-found.

  “Honest and open, Cooper, remember?” said Masters, attempting to read my thoughts, her ear to the cell. The connection made, she put a finger in her other ear and turned away to talk.

  Ten minutes later we were strapped into jump seats in the C-130. I loaded up on painkillers with a sleeping pill chaser, and took off for the Land of Nod.

  And then suddenly I was awake as the plane lurched and the pitch of the screaming turboprop changed. The approach to Balard Airport, gateway to sunny Baghdad, had begun.

  Masters yelled over the roar of the turbines, “Can you let go of my leg now, Cooper? You’re cutting off the circulation.”

  I glanced down. My hand was locked around her upper thigh and my knuckles were white with the strain. “Sorry,” I yelled back, releasing her.

  “You need to see someone,” she suggested.

  I wanted to snap back something witty but my brain was frozen with fear. Not one but two transport aircraft identical to the one we were in had crashed in the last five months—one because of small-arms ground fire closer to the runway, the other because the aircraft was flying a wild approach just to avoid possible ground fire. Like us. I remembered reading about it—I’ve developed a morbid curiosity about air crashes that has increased exponentially as my own fear of flying has grown. Metal fatigue led to the horizontal stabilizer cracking as the plane spiraled downward. The C-130 had cartwheeled into the ground, breaking up and exploding and turning the pilot and copilot into little fireballs squeezed like flaming orange pips from the main body of the tumbling, burning wreckage. Okay, so maybe the bit about the orange pips wasn’t included in the news article, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have been too far from the truth.

  I glanced out the small window. Down on the ground twenty thousand feet below, I could see strings of yellow lights marking the passage of roads across the desert. It looked peaceful enough. The plane dipped sickeningly as we commenced the descending corkscrew. My stomach tried to scramble out of my mouth as the wings flipped seemingly at right angles to level flight. The descent slowed—maybe the pilot overcooked it—and we went from negative Gs to a fistful of positive ones, my head suddenly weighing three times more than normal. My ears popped as the plane heeled over again, the engines screaming, air-frame shuddering—the thing about to break up and scatter us all across the sand.

  And then the main wheels kissed the runway and squealed reassuringly. I unbuckled, eager to get out and face the car bombers, the suicide bombers, and all the other nut bombers this place had to offer. Anything, in fact, to get the hell away from air travel.

  Masters and I stood on the tarmac with our bags at our feet, shivering in the predawn chill, and scoped the surroundings. The horizon was so flat it almost curved, and one quarter of it was outlined in orange, green, and purple where the sun was about to make an appearance. On the airfield sat the usual collection of C-130s and C-5s, as well as a couple of F-16 and F-15 fighters. Some frightening-looking Russian aircraft were also parked here and there, seemingly assembled with duct tape, strips of the stuff hanging from various engine panels. Half a dozen Black Hawk helicopters and several Cobra gun-ships were corralled in a separate area, their main rotor blades sagging under their own weight.

  A bunch of tents and demountables had been set up as the APOD—aerial port of debarkation, the military equivalent of immigration—and the battery of portable generators servicing them hummed in competition with the air-con units and the distant turboprop growl of approaching aircraft. The Stars and Stripes hung limp from a central flagpole. More Stars and Stripes hung from each of the tents. U.S. Army and Marine Corps combat troops milled about, mixing with aircrews and heavily armored civilians carrying weaponry. Beyond this activity was a large parking lot of Humvees and light armored vehicles bristling with machine guns, grenade launchers, and TOWs—tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missiles. Beyond these was a wall of towering concrete pillars topped with razor wire that said “FUCK OFF” in no uncertain terms to any unauthorized personnel on the other side.

  Masters and I walked toward the APOD in silence. “Arrivals over there,” said a sergeant, her Kevlar helmet low over her eyes, as we approached the demountable. She pointed with a clipboard toward a cluster of tents where a large number of personnel were waiting in line. We made our way over and joined the line.

  Masters passed our movement orders to the army lieutenant and the woman checked us out on her laptop. “Yep, we’ve got you here,” she said, frowning at the screen. “I’ll need to scan you in. You want to get around this place, every journey starts with your CAC card. You’ll need to flash ’em all over the place. Whatever you do, don’t lose ’em. And for God’s sake, stay in uniform. Our boys tend to shoot what they don’t recognize. Capisce?”

  We nodded and handed over our CAC cards—the smart cards that contained a chip holding an array of information including, among other things, our blood types. Just in case.

  “You’re both classed Space A,” the lieutenant continued, “so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting on a convoy manifest. You been here before?”

  Both Masters and I shook our heads. The lieutenant gave us a small evil smile. From it I gathered that we were in for some serious unpleasantness. “We don’t move around Eye-rak unless it’s in convoy strength. You’re heading to the green zone?”

  Masters and I nodded.

  “You’ll love the place,” she said, giving us her devil smile again. “All the comforts of home, plus mortar fire. Make your way across to the main demountable and pick up your flaks and Kevlar and M9s. But, if you’re in a hurry to start enjoying your time here, better get your names on a transport manifest first. They’re filling up fast. Anything else?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Be safe,” she said, this time fixing us with a look of intensity, meaning it. Then it dissolved and she barked, looking at the marine sergeant behind us, “Next!”

  We joined another line to get on a transport manifest. That done, we went to the demountable as directed to sign for and collect our flaks, Kevlar helmets, and sidearms.

  By the time we left the converted shipping container, the sun had cleared the horizon. The desert night chill had been replaced by a heat that smacked off the tarmac and curled the hair in my nostrils.

  I’d assumed the convoy we’d be joining into Baghdad would be a road-going one, but I was wrong. A duty sergeant pointed us in the direction of six Black Hawks, their turbine engines emitting the familiar flat snarl accompanied by the swoop-swoop of the main rotor through the air. One of the Cobras was also winding up to a dull roar. Its nose-mounted Gatling gun swung left and right as the weapons specialist in the front seat went through his checks. Masters smiled and gave my shoulder a pat. Despite the heat, the sweat under my flak jacket was cold.

  A loadmaster directed us to the lead Black Hawk, where a flight sergeant beckoned. He was a little guy whose large helmet gave him the appearance of a green lollipop. It was too noisy to speak, or I was too scared—I’m not sure which. He pointed at my M9 pistol in its shoulder holster. I knew the drill. I removed it and showed him that its magazine had been removed. He gave me the thumbs-up and Masters repeated the action. Satisfied, he slapped his hand on the deck of the forward compartment. Masters propped her gear onto the floor and climbed in after it. The waist gunner pointed at the pull-down seat against the bulkhead. I followed and took the seat next to her. The door gunner stepped nimbly up and buckled himself into the seat beside me. It was all very cozy.

  We sat there rocking gently with the centrifugal forces driving the helo’s revolving pa
rts, the roar of its turbines in our ears. Two riflemen sat in the seats opposite, their heads forward, leaning on the stocks of the inverted M16s as if they were praying. If there was any time to get religion, this was it. The faces I could see looked pretty grim, which wasn’t reassuring, particularly when one of them was the pilot’s.

  The Black Hawk stuck to the uninhabited parts of the desert, which wasn’t so hard given that much of it was exactly that. But then we closed on Baghdad and the ride quickly got wilder than anything Disneyland has to offer. We began jinking, climbing, and descending as if the pilot was suffering an epileptic seizure—all while the desert skimmed past barely two hundred and fifty feet below. Both the riflemen opposite barfed into the bags provided. Behind Masters’s sunglasses, I could see that her eyes were rigidly fixed on some part of the airframe. The muscles in her jaw were bunching and flexing. The gunners on the doors were oblivious to the motion—this being their office of business—and spent the entire flight tracking dangerous-looking goats and small groups of people down on the sand, nervously swinging their guns here and there waiting for the least excuse to send down a few hundred hot 7.62mm slugs. I was aware of the Cobra sitting off our left door about five hundred feet away, looking like some lethal species of prehistoric bug. I was having an out-of-body experience, taking it all in from a disembodied point somewhere high above the scene. I’d experienced something like this before and so I recognized it for what it was—shock.

  “You okay, Cooper?”

  “Wha—”

  “Snap out of it. We’re here—BIAP.”

  “Where?”

  “BIAP—Baghdad International Airport.”