I suddenly realized that the helo was on the ground and I was the only person in it, aside from the aircrew shutting it down. The soldiers seated opposite were no longer there, and neither were the gunners. Embarrassing. Masters was standing on the tarmac, hands on her hips, looking at me. It was a look of impatience. The air was thick with the smells of hot kerosene and vomit. Not mine, and I decided that was something at least. I released the harness and climbed out.
“You really need to do something about that. How long have you had the problem?” asked Masters as we walked in the heat radiating from the sky above and from the tarmac below toward the Baghdad International Airport APOD.
I countered her question with a question. “How many airplane crashes have you walked away from?”
“None. You?”
“Two.”
“Oh. Okay, that makes sense.” Masters stopped. “They can help you, you know.”
“Who can? Shrinks?”
“Psychologists.”
“No, thanks. Their wings are prone to falling off, too.”
Masters dropped it, recognizing the conversation was like a goat trail in the desert—it would go nowhere.
The APOD erected in the dirt was reminiscent of the one back at Balard, just a collection of tents and demountables surrounded by rubbish—soda cans, paper, plastic, car tires, and, oddly, a clothes dryer. It was still early morning but the sun’s heat was already fierce, hammering down, boring through my Kevlar. We made our way toward the biggest tent, presented our CAC cards to an army corporal, and asked to be put on the manifest for the first convoy heading out for the Baghdad green zone. He told us to hurry. There was room on the next convoy, but it was leaving any second. We kept moving. Half a dozen heavily armed Humvees were idling out back.
A sunburned soldier sitting up behind the roof-mounted M2 machine gun in the last vehicle motioned at us to get in as the lead vehicle began to move off. The door opened and Masters and I jumped in.
“Make yourself at home, folks,” said the corporal seated in the front passenger seat, moving a quid of chewing tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. In his hand was a plastic water bottle still carrying the sticker for some local brand, half filled with a licorice-colored sludge. He turned around, struggling in his flaks, a startlingly wide grin splitting his round face in half. “Where y’all from?”
“Germany,” I said.
“Where ’bouts is that?”
“Europe.”
“I thought there might be a Germany in South Carolina or somewhere. You know, like how there’s a Paris in Texas?”
“No, just Germany—in the land of the Germans,” I said, earning a kick from Masters.
“Well, wherever y’all come from, welcome to Eye-rak.” He put the bottle to his lips and squeezed out a mouthful of black saliva that coated the bottle’s insides. “Can I offer you folks some good ol’ American snuff? It’s mint-flavored. Keeps the stink of this place out of your nose.”
I shook my head. “Thanks for offering.”
The gunner’s knees occupied the space in front of my face. I spat on the window and smeared a circle of dust away so that I could watch Baghdad flash by.
The convoy slowed when it reached the exit. I saw that the entire airport was ringed with high, reinforced concrete blocks crowned with more razor wire. A collection of Abrams M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles—over five hundred tons of armor-plated steel—stood guard.
“You’re new here, aren’t you?” the man in front said as we accelerated once more. His grin was vast. I wouldn’t have been surprised if his face disappeared and, Cheshire cat–like, this grin remained behind, disembodied.
“Yeah. How can you tell?”
“’Cause I saw y’all hanging around at the APOD and I pegged you as newbies—lookin’ around, sorta not knowing what the hell to do next.”
“We’re investigators,” I said. “We’re paid to look lost.”
“Well, sit back and hang on, folks. It’s only four klicks to the green zone and we do it in pretty quick time.”
He wasn’t kidding. Our vehicles accelerated and held their speed—stopping for nothing and no one. We blasted through a couple of intersections, running red lights. Out on the expressway, we had at least twenty miles per hour on the surrounding traffic, which, for the most part, seemed to be worn-out old European vehicles so riddled with bullet holes that they looked like mobile sieves.
Baghdad slid by in the spit-and dirt-encrusted porthole beside me. Through this looking glass, I could see that the Iraqis largely ignored us, even though we were charging through them at a speed hazardous to their health. Iraqi males stood on the streets, hanging out at shopfronts, talking, or drinking what I assumed was coffee, there being no alcohol hereabouts. They wore a mixture of western and Arabic clothes—jeans and pants or loose, flowing robes. Where they all seemed to agree, however, was on the subject of mustaches. The shaggy caterpillars were everywhere. Every second guy reminded me of Saddam Hussein. The dictator might have been toppled but his barber was still out there, and the guy was making a killing.
I caught a glimpse of the green zone before we came up on it, a vast wall of the same towering concrete blocks and barbed wire out at BIAP, only these were spray-painted here and there with slogans in Arabic that I guessed were probably not warm greetings from the local population. We made our way through lines of ancient, battered European vehicles belching smoke and unburned gas, all caked in fine beige dust. The way ahead was blocked for the locals by Abrams M1 main battle tanks and Iraqi police. These obstructions slowed the traffic to a snarl, and heat boiled off the engines, further cooking the air so that it shimmered against the baked blue sky like running water. No one seemed in a particular hurry to move, unless it was to lean on their horns.
Once inside the walls, the convoy took on a more leisurely pace. I could almost hear the sigh of relief coming from the front seat. The Cheshire cat turned and said, “Well, here we are. Y’all enjoy the ride?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where can we set y’all down?”
“The HQ, thanks, Corporal,” said Masters.
He nodded, turned, and muttered some instructions to the driver. Minutes later we pulled up in front of a building-sized Arabic wedding cake.
TWENTY
The one-star general regarded us silently over the cathedral of his laced fingertips as we stood in front of his desk. He tapped his forefingers together. He was balding and not doing it graciously. A large flap of dyed brown hair originating from a single point above one ear had been artfully coiffed over the roof of his head, thinly disguising the presence of a collection of fat brown freckles. So this was General Harold Lee Edwards, the Judge Advocate General officer for the U.S. Army operating in Iraq, the man widely known as “the hanging judge.” His lean face was pinched and drawn toward a sharp, upturned nose that was mostly white gristle. He could play the character of Ichabod Crane in a movie without having to visit the makeup department. His teeth were yellow and appeared to slope backward into his mouth like the barbs on a spear. The word around was that once Edwards got hold of you, he never let go.
“General Gruyere has briefed me already,” he said at last, in a voice that reminded me of a piece of wood being worked over by a rasp. I guessed he was a longtime smoker. “She has told me to lend you both every assistance. I won’t interfere in your investigation, but you must abide by the rules. You leave this compound, you go in convoy.” He leaned back in his chair. “At ease. Do you know who you want to interview?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “We would like to review the autopsy processes at the Twenty-eighth Combat Support Hospital—”
“You’ll need to see Colonel Dwyer. He runs the place.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So you will be gone tomorrow.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a question or an order. I gambled. “There’s every likelihood of that, sir.”
“Good, I’ll get you on a manifest in advance. What abo
ut you, Major…Major…”
“Special Agent Masters.”
“Special Agent Masters,” he repeated. He checked his briefing notes to make sure he’d got it right. His sight mustn’t have been too good. Masters’s name was on her shirt not three feet away. “Hot enough here for you?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Well, let’s hope the hajis give you a break and don’t throw too many bombs at you and make it even warmer.” The general smiled, or at least I thought he smiled—it could have been gas.
Masters gave the only possible answer. “Yes, sir.”
“Hajis, sir?” I asked.
“Locals—that’s what we call ’em.” General Edwards coughed and looked down again at his notes. “Room is at a premium here since the Iraqi government decided to reduce our compound. Fortunately, in the past week, some of our people rotated home. I’ve got you rooms in the Al-Rasheed. My adjutant will see to it. It’s a few hundred feet from the wall and prone to rocket fire, but it’s not a bad hotel. Also, a few survival tips. When you’re outside the wall, stay away from dirt mounds, vehicle wrecks, and piles of rubble. That’s where the hajis like setting their IEDs—improvised explosive devices. Good hunting. Dismissed.” He shuffled his notes like all staff officers do when they want you gone. We took the hint.
The adjutant, a lieutenant colonel, had better things to do than babysit a couple of MPs. I knew this because he said so. He took us across to the Al-Rasheed, a charmless brown lump of concrete pockmarked like an adolescent’s face by the aforementioned rocket fire. We walked into the lobby, where a sergeant sat behind the reception desk with her feet up, watching cartoons on a new Sony hooked up to satellite cable. She got to her feet pretty quickly, but the lieutenant colonel ignored her like she didn’t exist. He grabbed a key off a board covered in hooks. He tossed it to Masters and said, “Best we can do. Hope you guys enjoy a close working relationship. I know the general said rooms…” he emphasized the plural. “Got a problem with it, try finding someone who gives a shit.” With that, he stalked out.
“Must be the heat,” I said. Actually, the foyer of the Al-Rasheed was cold, air-conditioned down to about Alaska in the fall. I shivered.
“First floor, turn right. Sorry,” the sergeant said with a shrug.
We took the elevator to the first floor, wondering about the apology. Was she apologizing to us because we had to share a room? Surely not. We stepped out and were immediately hit with the heat—the air-con was out. Yellow tape was strung across the hallway. Eighty feet beyond the tape was daylight where one of those pesky unguided rockets the general mentioned had scored a hit and caused a minor cave-in.
“Be it ever so humble…” said Masters, keying the lock. The room wasn’t so bad—a time capsule of seventies chic. It was almost the height of modern interior-design fashion, these things happening to come full circle eventually.
I cased the facilities. “Hey, look,” I called out. “We’ve got a Jacuzzi.”
TWENTY-ONE
Special Agent Masters didn’t respond to my offer of a Jacuzzi ride, but I wasn’t expecting her to. I turned on the hot water faucet. A small spider scrambled from the waterspout when the pipes began to thrum. A dribble of brown water followed.
Suddenly an explosion, a big one, rumbled through the Al-Rasheed’s foundations. Before I knew it, Masters and I were taking the stairs four at a time. We hit the street and saw a rising column of black smoke half a mile away, beyond the wall. Servicemen and-women spilled out of the hotel and held their hands over their eyes, shielding them from the fierce glare of the sun to get a better look.
“Damn truck bomb,” said one marine sergeant, shaking his head slowly.
By the time we arrived at the hospital set up in one of Saddam’s palaces in the green zone, the dead and wounded were arriving. Humvees and ambulances were unloading casualties, and so were the helos landing somewhere behind the building. Inside, a parody of a Baghdad traffic jam was in full swing. A gridlock of gurneys was loaded with cut and broken people, exposed skin blackened with burns and soot, dark crimson blood flowing from ragged flaps of skin.
The white marble floor of the main entrance hall was slippery with blood and dirt. Medical staff crawled over each new arrival, their hands flitting over limbs, torsos, and heads searching for wounds, shouting instructions that were sometimes ignored because everyone in the place was already engaged in a pitched battle with death. The men and women cut to pieces when the truck loaded with scrap metal exploded beside their convoy were mostly quiet, some through force of will, others because they were in shock, others because it probably hurt more to scream, their faces melted and lungs seared. Some whimpered or moaned. Some called for their mothers. Occasionally, a screamer would come through making a sound like a wild animal, the veneer of civilization stripped away, the casualty reduced to a primitive state of raw and savage survival, frontal lobes bypassed and the reptile brain engaged in the fight for life.
Nurses wheeled around stands containing bags of fluids and blood, or hooked up IVs, or raced around on errands. Instructions kept being yelled as, here and there, patients flat-lined.
The smell of blood, urine, and feces was overwhelming, and so was the noise. I realized that getting sense from anyone here was going to be, as Brenda would have said in the lexicon of nineties’ positive-speak, a challenge.
Masters grabbed a passing lieutenant’s arm and shouted, “Do you know where we can find Colonel Dwyer?”
“There,” said the young man, gore caked on his arms up to the elbows, gesturing at a room off the hall with a nod of his head. A sign on the wall read “Trauma Room 2.”
Masters and I dodged medical staff rushing from patient to patient, careful not to slip on the slickened floor. A PFC was spreading sawdust around to soak up the blood and urine. Trauma Room 2 was similar in size and shape to the main hall, with a marble floor and a towering vaulted ceiling enclosing an enormous space. Giant mosaics of the former dictator illustrated well-documented moments in his life: firing an AK-47 from a balcony, playing the avuncular leader to his troops, being the kindhearted parent to a child perched on his knee. Smiles all round. Stained-glass windows set with blue, red, and green glass in complicated geometric patterns threw technicolor light onto the upper walls. The intricate interplay of shapes took the eyeballs on a journey to the ceiling, where golden stars twinkled happily in a cobalt blue universe. In all, a nice place to die.
The wounded in this room had been separated from the others. They were the ones with shattered limbs being triaged for surgery. The medical staff wore scrubs over their ACUs, obscuring rank. I asked a passing nurse to point out Colonel Dwyer. He indicated a man close to fifty and as black and shiny as a new tire.
“Colonel Dwyer,” I said. “Special Agent Cooper, and this is Special Agent Masters, OSI. I called you this morning?” The colonel looked up from a compound fracture he was assessing. I’d broken with my habit of not calling ahead because it would have been just a tad inconvenient for us if the colonel hadn’t been around, given that we’d come all the way from Germany for his assistance.
“Yeah. To be honest, I forgot you were coming,” said the surgeon. “Can’t it wait?”
I didn’t want to be insensitive but we were also pressed for time. “Till when, sir?”
The CO of the hospital sighed deeply, realizing we weren’t going to just go away, and then returned to the task at hand. “Just remind me. You’re investigating a murder, right?” he said as he probed around a white stick of bone protruding from his patient’s quadricep.
“That’s right, sir.”
“One murder?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve come all the way from Europe to find the killer of just one man?”
“Correct, sir.”
The colonel bent down and spoke softly to the unconscious soldier under his fingertips. “You’re a lucky woman, Captain. No vascular damage—nothing we can’t fix, anyway.” He murmured something to an
assistant, then pulled off his rubber gloves with a slap. “In the context of what’s going on around here, Special Agent, have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”
I stayed silent. I didn’t think the colonel was really looking for an answer.
“What’s so important about this murder victim?” he continued.
“Aside from his rank, sir?”
“Yes, you told me on the phone. A four-star. Wouldn’t it be far more beneficial if you and your department could find the individual responsible for all this?” he said with a sweep of his arm, gesturing at the carnage piling up in the room and outside. “You see what I’m getting at, Special Agent?”
“Yes, sir.” Actually, I agreed with him. In this hospital alone, where death was being serviced with all the alacrity of a conveyor belt, the preoccupation with one killing among so many did seem puerile. But agreeing with the colonel was one thing and being able to do anything about it was something else entirely. We both had our jobs. I knew that, and so did the colonel.
“Forget it,” Dwyer said after a big sigh. “How can I help you guys?”
“This is Captain Blood,” said Colonel Dwyer. “Captain, this is Special Agent Cooper and Special Agent Masters, OSI. Please afford them every assistance. They’re investigating a matter of national security. They’re interested in knowing how we process the KIAs.”
“Yes, sir,” said the captain, standing beside his computer monitor.
“Come and see me if there’s anything else I can do for you.” The colonel gave us both a nod and then departed, diving his hands into a pair of rubber gloves held out by a nurse.
“So, Captain Blood,” I said, searching around for something witty to say about the appropriateness of his name.
“Yes, sir?” Blood was tall, with pale red hair and skin the color of a bleached bedsheet. He reminded me of C-3PO. I saw the length of the line forming at the captain’s door and decided against being a wiseass. No one in the line seemed impatient to get processed. They had all the time in the world—an eternity, in fact.
The Death Trust Page 16
