Team Red

by David DeBatto

  Hassan stopped.

  He closed his eyes.

  “What up with that?” Dan said. The doctor examined the patient.

  “He sleeps,” the doctor said.

  “I think I mellowed his harsh,” DeLuca said, dropping the flow regulator. “Let’s talk in the hall.”

  Outside the hospital room, he turned to Khalil. “What was that he said in Arabic?”

  “‘He will avenge. For us,’” Khalil said.

  “‘For us’?” DeLuca asked. “Not ‘for me’? You’re sure?”

  Khalil nodded.

  “‘Become death,’” Dan said. “Why is that ringing a bell? That’s not just bad grammar.”

  “Robert Oppenheimer,” DeLuca said. “Alamagordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945, after the first test of the A-bomb. ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’ He was quoting Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita.”

  “‘He is the teacher and you will learn,’” Dan said. “What’s that mean?”

  “‘He is the teacher,’ not ‘it is the teacher,’” DeLuca said. “But then, ‘you do not have it,’ and not ‘you do not have him.’ And ‘contained’? ‘Lanatullah cannot be contained.’ Not ‘arrested’ or ‘imprisoned.’ Contained.”

  “You think Lanatullah is a person? Or a thing?”

  “Maybe both,” DeLuca said.

  He was considering what to do next when he saw a man at the end of the hall. The man, in blue jeans, white shirt, and jogging shoes, stopped in his tracks when he saw DeLuca and Sykes in full battle rattle.

  DeLuca and the man made eye contact.

  The man took off running.

  DeLuca took off after him, racing at full speed, drawing his Beretta from his leg rig as he ran, which slowed him down. He turned left where the hall came to a tee. At the far end of the adjoining hall, he saw a door swing shut.

  He turned, dodging an empty gurney still rolling into his path. When he looked behind him, he saw Sykes, trying to catch up. A family of three, huddled by a water cooler, cowered as he ran past.

  The door led to an empty stairway. DeLuca heard nothing, flying down the stairs three at a time and hitting the landing hard enough to make his knees buckle.

  Double doors opened onto a wider corridor, the walls lined with children’s portraits of Saddam rendered in Crayon. Briefly, DeLuca saw the running man’s white shirt veer suddenly right where the corridor ended. Another set of double doors opened onto the hospital lobby, which was crowded with groups of Iraqis huddled together, women holding children, men supporting other men, old couples with nowhere else to go. DeLuca raced toward the front door and stepped out into the night.

  There, he paused, listening, catching his breath.

  He heard only crickets, music playing from a car radio, the chunk-ka-chunk of a nearby oil pump and the far-off whine of a motor scooter engine. Whoever he’d been chasing had escaped, disappearing into the neighborhood. DeLuca lacked the manpower to go after him.

  Sykes caught up to him, out of breath, his own automatic at the ready.

  “Nothing?” he asked.

  DeLuca shook his head, scanning the horizon.

  “Shit,” Sykes said.

  DeLuca radioed the Hummer and asked the MPs if they’d seen anybody run past. They hadn’t. He looked around one more time.

  “You wanna tell me who that was?” Sykes asked. “Or were we just chasing him because he ran?”

  “Or was he just running because we were chasing him?” DeLuca countered.

  “Does this have anything to do with it?” Dan asked, taking a wanted poster with DeLuca’s picture on it from his pocket. “Look, man, I got your back no matter what, you know that. I was just wondering.”

  “I doubt it,” DeLuca said. He’d asked Reicken to keep it quiet, but a war zone was a hard place to keep anything quiet for long. “If they were trying to collect, they would have shot at me, I’d suppose.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “I’m not 100 percent,” DeLuca said, holstering his weapon, “but if I had to bet, I’d bet it was Hassan’s brother Ibrahim. You see the family resemblance?”

  “I saw a white shirt,” Sykes said. “I never caught the face. Let me guess—he had a mustache?”

  “You might want to practice looking at faces,” DeLuca advised the younger man. “White shirts are all the same.”

  Upstairs, he instructed the doctor to contact the post when Hassan Al-Tariq awoke. He told the doctor he was a friend of Omar Hadid, and that he would appreciate it if the doctor kept track of visitors. He hoped Hadid would back him up. He had a feeling he would.

  It was 2200 hours by the time he got back to Balad. He was dog-tired, but he had one more phone call to make. It was two in the afternoon back in Boston. He dialed the number he’d programmed into his phone and waited.

  “Walter Ford,” the voice on the other end said.

  “Professor Ford,” DeLuca said. “I heard you’ve been giving poker lessons and I was hoping I could sign up for a class.”

  “Hello, David,” Ford said, as calmly as if he’d been expecting the call all day. “You must have been talking to Gillian. She should know better than to go against me with a sixty-five.”

  DeLuca could easily picture his old friend, largely because he was as much a creature of habit as anybody he’d ever known. It was summer, so Walter would be wearing gray pants, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a red tie, held in place with a Shriners tie clip. There would be a cup of green tea in a Red Sox mug next to him, kept warm on a hotplate Walter’s wife, Martha, had given him. He was as unflappable and as indefatigable as anybody DeLuca had ever known, training he claimed he’d received in Vietnam, where he’d been a marksman with Special Forces, sitting watch in the jungle for hours on end without moving a muscle, staring through a 25X scope mounted to a .50-caliber M-40A1 sniper rifle that allowed him to take out targets from nearly a mile away. During a crackdown on the Boston Mafia’s Anguilo family, Ford had sat surveillance on a north-end Italian social club on Belgravia Street for as much as twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly three months. His wife was thrilled when he retired to teach criminology part time at Northeastern University, in one of the best criminal justice programs in the country. His pension would have been enough to live on, but he wasn’t the type to stay home baking bread.

  “What are you lecturing about today?” DeLuca asked him.

  “Sexual homicide, motives and motifs,” Ford said. “The kids love this one. They like the story about the guy with the heads.”

  “Everyone likes that story,” DeLuca said. “You got a minute? I know these are your office hours . . .”

  “I’d rather talk to you,” Ford said. “Yesterday a student asked me why they called him the Boston Strangler. Sometimes I lock the door and pretend I’m not here.”

  “I think I got something I could use some help with,” DeLuca said. “A guy I was hoping you could find.”

  He filled Walter in. Walter listened. When DeLuca was finished, Walter Ford thought for a moment.

  “Let me try to sum it up from my notes and you tell me if I forgot anything or if I’m leaving anything out. You got a guy named Mohammed Al-Tariq, with a Q, not a K, who everybody thought was dead, who might not be quite as dead as people think, and he’s putting together a group called the Thousand Faces of Allah, or Alf Wajeh. A-l-f capital W-a-j-e-h. And you think the leader is a guy named Lanatullah. Capital L-a-n-a-t-u-l-l-a-h.”

  “Not a proper name,” DeLuca said. “More like a code name.”

  “And you think maybe this guy is a teacher? The guy in the hospital called him a teacher?”

  “He might have been speaking metaphorically,” DeLuca said.

  “And you think these guys may be planning some sort of large-scale attack on the United States,” Walter said. “And you’re calling me.”

  “I’m calling a lot of people,” DeLuca said. “Including my brother-in-law Tom at Homeland Security, who I think you should call. He’ll have an idea of wh
at’s getting batted around in the chatter. Right now it’s just a rumor. I couldn’t begin to list all the rumors we’re chasing over here, and about half of them involve large-scale attacks on the United States.”

  “I can imagine,” Ford said. “So this isn’t a nuclear thing, as far as you can tell? I read an article about dirty bombs that scared the crap out of me.”

  “Nothing is pointing that way,” DeLuca said. “At least for us. My source said he thought it was biological, so that’s where we’re heading. But that could mean any number of things. Could be chemical. We’re trying to narrow it down. And find somebody willing to flip for us.”

  “So I’m looking for an academic, then,” Ford said. “Male, most likely. Anybody who might have written a book entitled, ‘Alf Wajeh and Me—How I Became Lanatullah and Led a Biological Attack on the United States.’ That about it?”

  “Yeah,” DeLuca said. “You could start by searching Amazon.com.”

  “I’ll call your brother-in-law and talk it over with him.”

  “Why don’t you see if Sami wants to join the party,” DeLuca said. “If he’s free. Have you talked to him lately?”

  “I talked to him this morning,” Walter Ford said. “He wanted me to come with him tomorrow and cruise over to P-town to see a man about a diesel.”

  “How’re the stripers hitting?”

  “Better than the Sox.”

  Sami’s full name was Sami Jambazian, a Lebanese-American who’d retired from the police force as soon as he got his twenty in and bought a party boat dubbed The Lady J that he ran out of Gloucester. He kept a harpoon on board in the belief that one day he’d come across one of the giant bluefin tuna the Japanese sushi buyers with their dockside freezer trucks were paying as much as thirty thousand dollars a fish for, but other than that, he was something of a pessimist, frequently cranky. He was tough, brave, loyal, and best of all, he was fluent in Arabic.

  “I’ll see what he’s up to,” Walter said. “It might be good for him. He says he doesn’t miss the job, but I think he does.”

  DeLuca got two pieces of bad news the next morning.

  The first was that Hassan Al-Tariq had died during the night, succumbing to septic shock. The doctor hadn’t seen anyone trying to visit Hassan before he died. DeLuca told the doctor to call him if anybody inquired about the body.

  The other bit of bad news came at the morning briefing. Halem Seeliyeh was dead, shot in his bed on his first night home, Vasquez had discovered. Probably by someone who wanted to keep him quiet, DeLuca guessed. No word on whether there’d been chickens at the Daura Foot and Mouth Disease Facility.

  Chapter Six

  THE BANQUET WAS HELD AT CJTF-7 HQ, BIAP, OR Combined Joint Task Force Seven Headquarters, Baghdad International Airport, in a large room that had been the Iraqi Air Force’s officers’ club, before CJTF-7 had filled it with computers and flat-screen monitors, but all of that had been removed for the feast. Two U-shaped configurations of tables faced each other, with the Americans sitting on one side and the Iraqi bigshots on the other, the tables bedecked with white linen tablecloths, bone china, silver services, and fine crystal goblets. The guests were from the DIA’s “white list,” men of influence in Iraq, tribal leaders and sheikhs, religious leaders, doctors, mayors and governors and police chiefs (along with their entourages, aides, and servants), chauffeured to the dinner in Chinook helicopters and driven from the landing zones in limousines escorted by Humvees and Bradleys. A company of M1 tanks surrounded the building, inside a perimeter of concertina wire, manned by infantry and MP security patrols, with Apache and Cobra gunships flying watch overhead. Inside, NCOs in dress uniforms with white towels over their arms waited on the guests, refilling glasses of chai and bottled water and soda and bringing the dishes one at a time, eggplant and tomato dishes, raw vegetables, whole Tigris river catfish served on rice, beef Wellington, and carrot cake drizzled in a raspberry reduction.

  DeLuca found Mack near the bar, waiting with a tray in her hand containing three empty wine glasses, a white apron tied around her waist.

  “What’s this fly doing in my soup?” he asked her.

  “That’s fly soup,” she told him. “It’s a local delicacy.”

  “Anything interesting?” he asked her.

  “Maybe,” she said. “The guy at table nine is the PUK’s director for Kirkuk. He was telling the man next to him he knows who set off the bomb outside the party offices, but he told us he had no idea. Sounds like he’s making plans to take care of it himself.” The bomb had killed five civilians, including two children, on a day when Kurdistan Patriotic Union leader Jalal Talbani had been visiting party headquarters.

  “Rah yentagem. Did he say who?” DeLuca asked.

  “He thinks it was Ansar al-Islam,” Mack said, referring to a group of militants, many of them foreigners with Al Qaeda ties, operating on the Iraq-Iran border. “But he thinks the KDP gave them directions.” The KDP was the Kurdistan Democratic party, currently in a struggle with the PUK for domination of Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated north.

  “What’s up at table ten?” DeLuca asked. “Those guys look like they’re about to strangle each other.”

  “They might,” she said. “They’ve been talking about horse racing. The old guy is one of the biggest breeders in Iraq and the sheikh across from him is trying to get him to admit the races were fixed under Saddam. Or something like that.”

  “Carry on,” DeLuca said.

  He extracted a bottle of tonic water from a chest full of ice and went out onto the balcony to enjoy it, leaning on the railing and watching the palm trees silhouetted against the lights of Balad in the distance. High overhead, a pair of jets streaked across the sky.

  “It’s not Herr Totenbrau, but it’s cold,” a voice behind him said. He turned to see Phil LeDoux. “Mind if I join you?”

  “You don’t have official duties that are more pressing?” DeLuca asked.

  “I think we’re making some good headway in there,” the general said. “They can probably spare me for a few minutes. How’s your evening been so far?”

  “Pretty good,” DeLuca said. “I’m working on the name of a horse in the fifth race at the Baghdad Equestrian Club. I’ll give you a call if I get it. I was going to call you anyway. Things might be developing. You got a minute?”

  LeDoux took two cigars from his shirt pocket and handed one to DeLuca.

  “I’ve got as long as it takes to smoke one of these,” he said, lighting his and extending his lighter to his old friend. DeLuca spat the end of the cigar off the balcony, lit his cigar, then briefed LeDoux on recent developments. He recapped his discussion with Omar Hadid and his offer to facilitate a meeting with Imam Fuaad Al-Sadreddin. DeLuca described his hospital visit, and how Mohammed Al-Tariq’s oldest son had referred to Lanatullah using the masculine pronoun, calling him a teacher, seeking vengeance, though he didn’t seem to know if his father were still alive, and finally his chase of a man he presumed to be Hassan Al-Tariq’s younger brother Ibrahim. DeLuca told LeDoux what they’d learned from the lab technician at Al Manal, and the leads they were looking into, the truck drivers they were hoping to track down, the gene IL-4, and “protocol 16.15,” whatever that was.

  “Unfortunately, both Hassan and Seeliyeh are dead,” DeLuca finished. “Hassan more or less from natural causes, but Seeliyeh was murdered in his sleep. Which in this country almost qualifies as natural causes. I’m worried that he was killed to keep him from talking to us.”

  “Any other reasons why somebody might want to kill him?” LeDoux inquired.

  “In Iraq?” DeLuca said. “Are you serious?”

  “Forget I asked.” LeDoux blew a cloud of smoke out into the night. “Is this pretty much confirming what you’ve been thinking?”

  “A lot of it is heading that way,” DeLuca said.

  “What about the rest of Al-Tariq’s family?” LeDoux wanted to know.

  “Four wives but just the two sons,” DeLuca said. “I was thinking
I might want to talk to them.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Unknown. But not unknowable.”

  The general tapped the end of his cigar on the railing, knocking the ashes off. The ashes drifted slowly to the sand below.

  “Captain Martin told me today you asked for a generator,” LeDoux said. “I’m afraid I might have barked at him a bit, but I told him if you asked for something, not to bother me, short of you wanting your own personal tank battalion.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Tell your friend Omar Hadid that I’d like to meet him,” LeDoux said. “Purely on a social basis. We invited him tonight but he declined.” As he spoke, a fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties came out onto the balcony alone, a wine glass filled with club soda in her right hand. She raised an eyebrow briefly at something LeDoux said, then took a position at the balcony railing far enough away to indicate she had no desire to eavesdrop.

  “I’m not surprised,” DeLuca said. “I’ll tell him.”

  LeDoux crushed his cigar out in a nearby ashtray.

  “You finish yours,” he told his old friend. “I’ve got to go back in and hobnob a bit more.”

  DeLuca found himself at the railing, staring off at the city lights and at the stars shining in the black sky above. The night air had cooled. The woman down from him had a pale lavender shawl around her shoulders. She was wearing an off-white linen dress that was simultaneously modest and stylish, hemmed at midcalf, sleeveless with a collar that turned up against her neck. She was wearing pearls, though there was nothing old-ladyish about them. He watched as she opened her purse, removed a pack of cigarettes, then searched the rest of her purse, apparently in vain, before putting the cigarettes back. She laughed to herself as she closed the purse with a snap.