Team Red

by David DeBatto

  “In case you’re worried, I wasn’t going through your things. It was sitting out in the open, and Mack was buzzing around, and I was afraid she’d see the prom picture I downloaded. I picked up Doc’s note by accident. I apologize for reading it.”

  DeLuca considered what to say.

  “I think he probably wanted you with him at the interrogation because he thought the mayor would open up to you before he would to a woman.”

  “Bullshit,” Dan said. “He kept me with him because it was the safer mission. I don’t want anybody taking special care of me, David. Let me go on the record with that.”

  “Reicken hasn’t said anything to me about it,” DeLuca said. “I don’t know what he said to Doc.”

  “But you knew,” Dan said. “You knew Doc was making accommodations.”

  “He mentioned that Reicken had gotten the word from on high,” DeLuca said. “He didn’t say what he was going to do about it.”

  “You know why we’re driving up-armored Hummers?” Dan said. “When all the other Guard and Reserve units are driving soft-tops? I called my father. He told me he’d pulled some strings and got ’em for us.”

  DeLuca thought that was interesting, considering how Reicken had made a point of boasting how he’d stood up for his men and put himself on the line for them when he requested armored Humvees for his CI battalion.

  “Then we’ve all benefited from your companionship in more ways than one,” DeLuca said.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Dan said. “If I wanted to be bullshitted, I could have stayed home.”

  “I know,” DeLuca said. “You’re right. I won’t bullshit you.”

  “Reicken didn’t give you any special instructions?” Dan asked, almost spitting out the last two words.

  “Nothing,” DeLuca said. “That’s the truth.”

  “It’s just fucking insulting,” he said. “If I’d heard it from somebody I didn’t respect, I’d kick his ass in a New York minute. I wouldn’t expect my old man to understand that, but I’d expect you to.”

  “I think I do.”

  “I was happy when I heard you were going to be the new TL,” Sykes said, “but if all you’re going to do is babysit me, I’ll get a transfer. I love this team, but if that’s the deal, I’m out of here.”

  “Let me tell you the truth,” DeLuca said. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about . . . special considerations. I hadn’t had time to think about it. I didn’t think it would be right to put someone else on the team at extra risk just to spare you, frankly, but I was also trying to think of how to spin Reicken on this, because he’s such a royal ass-sucker that he’d step all over my shit and yours if I got between him and the ass he was trying to suck. So I hadn’t quite decided, but now I have. You’ll get the same treatment everybody else gets, but in exchange, you’re going to have to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to have to promise me you’ll watch your own ass and not take any stupid chances, because I’m thinking maybe you’re the type who’s going to try to do something extra, just to prove himself, now that you think we’ve been babying you along. That was Doc’s call. This is mine. You’re the same as everybody else. If you’ve got something to prove, it’s nothing that the rest of us don’t have to prove. I expect 110 percent from myself and from everybody else, so if I catch you giving 111 percent, I’m going to step you back, not because Daddy wants me to watch over you but because if one person on a team starts trying to be the hero, it puts everybody else in danger, and I’m not going to let that happen. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Dan said.

  “Good,” DeLuca said. “And as far as I’m concerned, this doesn’t have to go any further than here. So I’m done with this, if you are. Did Mack see the prom picture?”

  “No,” Dan said. “I wonder what the story was with the geek she went with? She could have done so much better.”

  In the OMT, DeLuca checked his e-mail. There were two messages from his son. The first said only, “Files attached.” The second one explained:

  Army Knowledge Online

  From: Scott.DeLuca@us.af.mil

  To: MrDavid@us.army.mil

  Hey Pops,

  As per, had some luck. It took a while because they didn’t use their own cars. I checked all the convoys and cross-border traffic in that region. Attached (separate e-mail) find maps (NIMA, local) with coordinates and related imagery. Positive ID on three of four wives, w/ approx. 4 other males, presume bodyguards/servants. No comsig in or out so far, which is weird. No sign Ibrahim either, but we don’t have back data. Will maintain surveillance when possible and provide updates. Area is hot with you-name-it (Ansar Al-Islam, Mek, et al.). Tell whoever goes to bring help, and keep me posted. Scott.

  The third e-mail was from his wife, who wrote:

  Dear David,

  This is not working. I don’t want you to call me to “try to work things out” one more time. How many times can we do that? Why should either of us have to live this way? Love is not supposed to feel this bad. It just isn’t. I haven’t slept a whole night since you left. I haven’t been happy since long before that. I’m not sure that you have either. These are just facts. I feel like I just realized them tonight, but I’ve also known them for a long time but I guess I’ve been in denial. I’m going to talk to a lawyer and figure out how to do this and where to go next. I can’t live this way any longer. I deserve to be happy. You need to be free to do what you feel you need to do without someone like me holding you back, so I’m not going to do that anymore.

  I’m sorry if you think doing this via e-mail is the wrong way to do it. I wanted you to know as soon as possible, but I knew I couldn’t say what I needed to say if I was talking to you on the phone. Please be careful.

  Bonnie

  He’d heard a story, since he’d first joined the military, probably apocryphal, about a soldier on TDY who gets a package in the mail, unmarked, and in the package there’s a videotape. In handwriting he doesn’t recognize, it says, “Show this to all your friends.” The tape is of a woman in a ski mask, having sex with a dozen or so bikers. At the end of the tape, she takes off her mask, and it’s the guy’s wife, who gives the camera the finger and says, “I want a divorce, asshole.” It probably never happened, but DeLuca understood why guys kept telling the story. It was everyone’s worst nightmare.

  The e-mail from Bonnie wasn’t a nightmare, or even a dream. It was altogether too real. And not entirely unexpected.

  Chapter Nine

  DELUCA HADN’T RIDDEN ON HORSEBACK SINCE he’d first become a cop, working out of a small adobe office in Yuma, Arizona, and occasionally joining border patrols with the infamous “Shadow Wolves,” a group of Native American police officers from the Tohono O’Odham tribe, employed by the INS and the DEA to track smugglers along the Mexican border. The horse he rode east toward the Iranian border was named Shabbut, “because he smells like fish,” Khalil explained. Khalil rode in front of him, following their guide, Bassam, with Adnan bringing up the rear. Since he was a teenager, Khalil had been smuggling alcohol and cigarettes across the border into Iran for his uncle, but only between Halabjah and Hawsud and never all the way to Sanandaj. Bassam was from the Koli clan, and would be able to arbitrate any encounters with members of the Imani or Sursur clans they were liable to meet along the way. He looked about fifteen. He would have to do.

  The horses were Akhal-Tekes, a tough Turkish mountain breed descended from horses left behind by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, short and stocky with thick coats and stubby black manes, not much to look at, Khalil said, but they were acclimated to the elevation and could go forever on little food or water. DeLuca and his two informants had flown to Irbil, where they’d driven the Hamilton road in a vehicle provided by special ops, a beat-up white Toyota pickup truck, though the mechanic had assured them the flaws were purely cosmetic, the truck otherwise sound and sure to bring them to their destination without attracting too much attent
ion from highwaymen, thieves, tribal rivals, insurgents, or lone gunmen. They’d been stopped twice by U.S. patrols, once in the Safin mountain village of Salaheddin and again at Spilik Pass, just beyond the ruins of Princess Zad’s castle, according to Khalil, who was acting as a tour guide along the way, much to Adnan’s annoyance. They’d switched to horseback in Halabjah.

  “Beyond this point,” the post commander there had told him, “you’re on your own. Just so you know, a lot more people go into the Zagros than come out.”

  There’d been no point in asking Reicken for permission to go into Iran. Reicken let his THTs plan their own missions with a hands-off I-can’t-get-in-trouble-if-I-don’t-know-about-it attitude, anyway. DeLuca didn’t mind that there were only the three of them. When he’d learned the location of Al-Tariq’s family, he’d talked it over with General LeDoux, who told him that even he would have a hard time okaying a mission into Iran, which, if it failed, would compromise delicate diplomatic negotiations going on intended to coax Iran into opening up its nuclear arms program to U.N. inspectors. On the other hand, there’d already been more than a dozen successful covert insertions, using one or two people, usually special ops. To pass for a local, he’d sent Khalil to purchase the appropriate clothing, he’d let his beard grow for a few days, and he’d applied a military version of the skin-darkening “instant tanning” creams sold on the civilian market back home, a product dubbed “Goon Juice” originally developed at the army lab in Natick. He carried the magnum in a shoulder holster and the Beretta in his leg rig, but he also carried, to blend in, a Kalashnikov 5.56mm AK-101, taken from one of the weapons caches they’d recovered. He felt, nevertheless, underdressed and underarmed compared to one group they passed, a dozen men bearing Kalashnikovs, Uzis, Dragunovs, 120mm mortars, and RPGs on mules traveling in the opposite direction on the other side of a river that was at that point too deep and too wide to cross, or their passage might have been challenged. As it was, the two parties waved at each other and proceeded on their way.

  “Any idea who those guys were?” DeLuca asked, once they were clear.

  “Don’t know,” Khalil said with a shrug. “I think maybe Ansar. Maybe Talbani.”

  “Talbani from Afghanistan?” DeLuca asked.

  “No, no—men who work for Jalal Talbani,” Khalil said, laughing. Jalal Talbani was a U.S. ally, “the king of mercenaries” and the head of the Kurdish clan that controlled Sulaymaniyah. “He wants to lead independent Kurdistan,” Khalil explained. “But so does Mustafa Barzani. So does Abdullah Ocalan. So do couple hundred other guys. Maybe I should do it. I think I would be good president. Do this, do that, you’re fired, you go to jail, you come to my bed. How hard could it be?”

  Adnan frowned. Bassam spoke no English.

  They’d left Halabjah in the morning, hoping to make camp by nightfall at a place Bassam had used before. The scenery during the day ranged from appalling to breathtaking, as they followed a trail through wastelands of clear-cut forests where, without trees to prevent erosion, the hillsides had been gutted and washed away by the rains—stagnant streams silted over, one place where the runoff from a leather tannery had killed all the fish—but then the trail would traverse a series of switchbacks, climbing through scrub oak and junipers to emerge in a mountain meadow as beautiful as any DeLuca had ever seen, with fields of daffodils and gladioli. Khalil explained that Kurdistan was where such flowers had first been domesticated, and they still grew wild.

  “Once there were tigers, too,” he said. “The ones in the Roman Coliseum came from here. All dead now. We still have leopards and many animals. Wolf. Hyenas. Jackals. Snakes. Many many birds. If we are lucky, we’ll see halo’i homd. Cliff eagles.”

  They saw villagers digging in the forests for truffles or collecting quince and hazelnuts and wild chestnuts, a staple of the poorer people’s diets. The terrain grew steeper as they approached the border, headed for a little-used pass Bassam knew about. At one point they picked their way up a dry riverbed where in several places they had to dismount and lead their horses up precipitous declivities. By late afternoon, they had crossed the pass into Iran (the Kurdish map Khalil carried had no such border on it but rather marked merely an internal subdivision of a disputative greater Kurdistan) and descended to a high plateau and grasslands where shepherds tended sheep whose wool would be dyed, spun into yarn, and used to weave carpets in places like Sandar or Darsim. Snowcapped five-thousand-foot peaks rose to the north and south. At the far side of the plateau, the trail wound down into an old-growth forest of oak and chestnuts, producing a canopy overhead thick enough to block out the sun, gnarled and twisting branches that seemed interlocked, as if the forest were a single massive living organism. Squirrels chattered their warnings as the men on horseback passed.

  “Bassam says many caves from here on,” Khalil reported. “From before history.”

  “Prehistoric,” DeLuca said.

  “Yes,” Khalil said. “Some have bones in them fifty thousand years old. I saw this once. A skeleton resting on a bed of twigs in a cave. I think somebody buried him there.”

  They wound along a hogback ridge, traversed a limestone scarp, and descended a series of switchbacks into a ravine that narrowed to only a few feet in places, the temperature dropping sharply between the rising walls where the sun could only shine a few minutes each day. It would have been a perfect place for an ambush. A stream formed at the base of the ravine, dropping into a doline that reminded DeLuca of the sumideros in Puerto Rico where he’d once trained. They turned south into a hanging valley and hugged the western wall until they mounted a short incline to a rock shelf affording a view of the valley below, the canyon wall rising a thousand feet behind them.

  Bassam dismounted and directed the others to do the same and to unload the animals, then led the party to the base of the cliff and a rocky overhang that formed a smile-shaped crack in the earth, about a hundred feet across. Climbing over the bottom lip, they found a cave about fifty feet across, with a twenty-foot ceiling and a depth DeLuca couldn’t estimate, because when he shone the flashlight he carried toward the rear of the cave, he saw only darkness.

  They dropped their packs and bedrolls. Bassam and Khalil spoke for a few minutes, and then Khalil approached DeLuca.

  “He says this is where we will stay,” Khalil said. “It is safe. No one comes here so no one will bother us. We will get wood for the fire.”

  Enough light from the fading day filtered into the mouth of the cave to reveal a firepit and a small pile of firewood, banked against a large rock face that formed a kind of natural hearth. The temperature had dropped steadily after the sun went down, and DeLuca was glad for the wool clothing he’d found so oppressive at noon. He was hungry enough to eat his blanket, though he knew he was going to need it later. He left Adnan by the firepit and climbed back out onto the escarpment, where he dialed his sat phone. Mack answered.

  “Hey, cowboy,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  “Yippee-ti-yi-ay,” he said. “What’s happening there? Any luck with the truck drivers? Faris Saad and Razdi what’shisname?”

  “Chellub. And some,” she said. “This guy Hoolie is pretty good, by the way. Anyway, we found the sister of one of the guys but she said her brother has gone into hiding because the other guy is dead and the first guy thinks he could be next.”

  “He was killed?”

  “I guess,” Mack said. “We don’t have the details yet.”

  “And the sister knows where her brother is?”

  “She says she doesn’t, but I think she does. She’s going to try to find him.”

  “What’d you offer her?”

  “We offered him protection,” Mack said. “Her, we offered a microwave.”

  “A what?”

  “Hoolie traded a guy some Tommy Hilfiger jeans for it. By the way, we hope you don’t mind but Hoolie had a friend from his unit in Tikrit transferred to the team. He’ll be here when you get back. Dan wants to talk to you.”

&nb
sp; “Hey, Tex,” Dan said, coming on the line. “Real quick—I found a guy who could help me clear up some of the things our lab assistant pal from the Daura Foot and Mouth Disease Facility left us with. His name is Kaplan, Major, and he works right here at the CASH on post, but back home he’s an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins, where they do a lot of work with BWs. You’re not going to like what he had to say.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “Well first of all, IL-4 is the gene that produces interleukin-4, which is a cytokine that stimulates the body to produce antibodies to fight off infections. We thought maybe they were working with vaccines that use interleukin-4, but then when I mentioned ‘protocol 16.15,’ he sort of got all pale. He went to his library and he came back with a book. Current Protocols in Molecular Biology, John Wiley and Sons pub., volume three, section 4.”

  “Which says?”

  “It’s directions on how to splice a gene into a poxvirus. It didn’t sound that hard—he said a gifted high-school organic chemistry student could do it, and the book gives you all the instructions. It’s not classified.”

  “So Halem Seeliyeh was doing genetic splicing?”

  “One part of the process. It’s not hard, but it takes a couple days. From the sound of it, they gave out different steps to different guys in different rooms so that nobody knew the full extent of what they were doing.”

  “And you said they were working with camel poxes at Daura?”

  “They were,” Dan said. “But that’s also a legitimate research area. Or a cover for something illegitimate. There’s a zillion kinds of poxes. The problem is, if you splice an IL-4 gene onto a poxvirus, you get a supervirus, basically. Interleukin-4 is only beneficial in controlled amounts. If you get too much, you start killing off your white blood cells.”

  “Like AIDS?”

  “Exactly like AIDS,” Dan said. “You get a nearly instantaneous AIDS-like suppression of the immune system, which renders the poxvirus vaccine-proof and makes it work a hundred times faster. They’ve already tested it with mouse pox. And you and I both know what poxes Iraq had in stock before the war.”