Of course he will. What good is that? I need you to tell me.
Why? What did it mean? Why wouldn’t Abu Nazir’s word be good enough for him? Why did it have to come from Romeo? Was it just a power trip on his part? She didn’t think so. The stakes were too high. Think, Carrie. Think.
I can’t, she thought. Clozapine wasn’t a cure-all. Oh God, let me sleep. I can do this, I swear, if I can just get some sleep.
By the time she showed up in Dreyer’s office that morning, in jeans and a T-shirt, with a Beretta M9 pistol Dreyer had given her, the sun was just edging over the tops of the buildings on the other side of the Tigris. It was going to be another hot day, she thought. Dreyer was already at work on his computer. One look at his face told her the bad news.
“Benson turned us down. I tried. Believe me, I tried,” Dreyer said.
“Well, he’s not turning me down,” she said, heading for the door.
“Carrie, wait!” he shouted. “Technically, we’re attached to the embassy. They’ll order me to send you back. We need you here. We can’t afford it.”
She stopped at the door and looked back at him. “I’ve gotten a lot of blood on my hands since this thing started, Perry. I can’t have any more. You do what you have to. So will I,” she said, and left.
She hit her cell phone and called the number Sergeant Major Coogan had given her for Captain Mullins, commander of the Special Forces Group being assigned to her by Colonel Salazar. He picked up before the first ring was completed. She told him where she was and what she needed. He said he’d be there in ten minutes.
“Meet me in the prime minister’s office. It’s on the second floor,” she said, ringing off and heading for the stairs. As she started up, Perry Dreyer joined her, followed by three of his staff, young men with M4s.
“If I can’t stop you, I guess they’ll have to fire us both,” he said.
They walked all the way around the big interior atrium to the prime minister’s corner office on the Yafa Street side of the building. Two armed Iraqi soldiers wearing the red berets of the Iraqi Security Forces guarded the door.
“Prime minister not in,” one of them said in bad English.
“Salaam alaikum, sadikh’khai,” Carrie said, greeting them in Arabic as friends. “You’re both Shiite, yes?” One of the soldiers nodded. “Of which tribe, habibi? Shammer Toga? Bani Malik? Al-Jabouri?” she asked, naming major Shiite tribes of the Baghdad area. She was guessing that al-Waliki, the candidate of the Shiites, would only trust being guarded by fellow Shiites, preferably from his own tribe.
“Bani Malik,” the first IFS guard said.
“Of course, as is Prime Minister al-Waliki.” Carrie nodded. “I should have known.”
“He is of al-Ali of the Bani Malik,” the guard said, indicating al-Waliki’s specific tribal subbranch.
“We’re from the CIA. Sunnis of al-Qaeda are planning to kill the prime minister this morning. No doubt you will die as well. Call your commander to join us and come with us,” she said, pushing past him and opening the door. She walked into the large, plush office where the prime minister, Wael al-Waliki, was meeting with Ambassador Robert Benson.
The two men were seated at a small mahogany table. Behind them, a curtained window, one of the few in the Convention Center, provided a view of the lawn and grounds and beyond the fence to tree-lined Yafa Street and the Al-Rasheed Hotel in the distance. Dreyer, the CIA men and the two Iraqi ISF guards were behind Carrie.
“What the hell is this? Get out—all of you,” Benson growled. Spotting Dreyer, he said, “Perry, I gave you strict orders. Are you that interested in committing career suicide? Get out.”
“He tried to stop me. This is my idea,” Carrie said to Benson, and to the Iraqi prime minister she added in Arabic, “Lahda, min fathlek, Prime Minister, but your life is in danger. You must listen.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are, miss, but this is a direct order. Get out of this room now,” Benson said.
“Ambassador, if I walk out, you and the prime minister will both be dead within the hour. So if you want to end my career tomorrow, fine, but I’m not leaving,” Carrie said.
“Who the hell is she?” Benson asked Dreyer.
“One of ours, Mr. Ambassador. You need to listen to her. She knows what she’s talking about.”
“Look, miss, thank you for your concern, but we don’t need protection. We’re in the well-guarded Green Zone, surrounded by American troops in the most protected building in the Green Zone, not to mention ISF guarding these offices. Your concern is unnecessary,” Benson said.
“And with all due respect to you, sir, AQI has infiltrated the ISF and they won’t give a shit who you are when they kill you. And if you could pull your head out of your own self-important ass for one second you’d realize that it doesn’t matter if they kill you. You’ll be replaced. But if they kill him”—she pointed at al-Waliki—“the Shiites go nuts and this whole country erupts in full-scale civil war.”
“What is this? Some kind of a joke?” Benson snapped.
“I just came from Ramadi last night covered in blood from one of my guys. Do I look like I’m joking? Right now, we need to get you and the prime minister to a safe location without anyone knowing. We have to do it immediately. Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“You and the prime minister both. We’re going to disguise you,” she said, and repeated it in Arabic for al-Waliki, then turned to Dreyer. “We need an absolutely safe location within the Convention Center. Someplace the ISF won’t look and that can hold at least a half dozen or more U.S. soldiers just to make sure they’ll be okay. Any ideas?”
“There are some rooms in the basement under the big round auditorium, the one where the parliament meets,” one of the CIA men said. “I heard someone say Saddam’s secret police used to use them for all kinds of shit. Drugs, interrogations, rape.”
“Charming,” Dreyer muttered.
At that moment, Captain Mullins arrived with a squad of soldiers in full combat gear, along with an Iraqi officer wearing the red ISF beret.
“You Carrie?” Mullins asked. He was a small, muscular man, about five seven, with brown eyes that took in everything in an instant.
“Why aren’t you at your posts?” the Iraqi officer said to the two ISF guards in Arabic.
“I needed them here. You’ll understand in a minute,” Carrie told him in Arabic. Then to Mullins, she said, “We need to get Ambassador Benson and Prime Minister al-Waliki to safety. This man, what’s your name?” She pointed at the CIA agent who’d mentioned the storage rooms.
“Tom. Tom Rosen,” he said.
“Tom will show you where to take them. We need men we can absolutely trust to guard them. How many men did you bring?” she asked Mullins.
“Two ODAs. A Teams. Twenty-four men, not counting me,” he said.
“How many can you spare? I need at least three or four,” she said. “They, plus our CIA staff can protect them. You’ve got the extra uniforms?”
One of Mullins’s men handed Carrie two pairs of ACUs, desert camouflage fatigues, and two M4s. She gave them to Benson and the prime minister.
“Put these on,” she told them. “You’ll pretend to be soldiers.” She turned to the ISF officer. “We want everyone else in the ISF to think they are still meeting in this office,” she told him in Arabic, motioning him closer. “Get fellow Shiites, men you know and trust, if possible from your own tribe. You need to find the AQI infiltrators. As soon as we leave, no one gets in or out of the Convention Center. Any Sunni soldier in this building who joined the ISF within the last three months is suspect. Disarm every one of them and turn them over to us for interrogation. They are not to be harmed, understand? They have critical information.”
She turned and translated for Dreyer what she had told him.
“And, Perry, whatever you do, don’t let them get rid of them or let them buy their way out. We need intel from whoever they take in as prisoner,” she
said to Dreyer.
Prime Minister al-Waliki stood and faced her. “You, CIA lady. I won’t do this. I can’t hide. What if someone sees me dressed like an American soldier? Politically, it would be the end of me,” he said in English.
“You have no choice,” she told him in Arabic. “Sunni elements of al-Qaeda are already inside the building. If they kill you, Iraq will split apart. There will be civil war. You know this better than anyone, Prime Minister. Then Saddam wins. He may die, but he wins. Put on the clothes for just an hour or two. Stay alive.”
Suddenly, the boom of a massive explosion rattled the windows. It was followed by additional booms from a cannon—Carrie was willing to bet from the 105-mm guns of the Abrams tanks—and a nonstop firestorm of small-arms fire. The battle had started.
“They’re attacking the Assassin’s Gate. Get your pants on,” she shouted at Benson. “Hurry!”
The Assassin’s Gate was a white stone arch over Haifa Street topped by a domelike sculpture that looked like an ancient Babylonian warrior’s helmet. It was about three hundred meters east of the Convention Center and had become one of the major checkpoint entries into the Green Zone. Led by one of Mullins’s team leaders, they headed east on Yafa Street, then down an alley behind the buildings toward Haifa Street, the sounds of the battle getting louder and louder the closer they got. In the gaps between the buildings, they could see Iraqis, men, women clutching children, some pushing carts, all running the other way on Yafa Street, fleeing the fighting.
They stopped beside a building, looking out toward a parking lot behind the children’s hospital. It was a big open area bordered by bushes. If the insurgents had taken over the hospital, they could be walking into an ambush. The sounds of the battle were very loud, an almost nonstop staccato of automatic-weapons fire punctuated by booming cannon fire. They could see the flashes of gunfire coming from the windows of the children’s hospital.
They formed into two A Teams, Alpha and Bravo, and gave Carrie the code name “Outlaw.” Master Sergeant Travis, on point for A Team Alpha, signaled that he was going in. A moment later, as he sprinted toward the parking lot, the other team members took up positions behind parked cars to provide covering fire as needed. But there was no fire from mujahideen from the windows or from the parking lot. As Captain Mullins had anticipated, everything was concentrated on the Haifa Street side of the hospital, where the battle was taking place.
Although she couldn’t see the fighting at the checkpoint from here, she anticipated that Colonel Salazar had turned it into a killing zone. With tanks and troops dug in to defend the checkpoint and more men and Bradleys brought up from behind to box the mujahideen in, it was plenty loud enough. What the big blast had been—an IED or a car bomb or something—she didn’t know, but it meant Americans had likely taken casualties too.
Warrant Officer Blazell, whom the others called “Crimson” because he came from Alabama, a six-foot-six, shaved-headed, midthirties African-American whom Mullins had assigned to look after her, tapped her on the shoulder and indicated that she should follow him as the team zigzagged across the parking lot, where two A Team members had already taken control of the back door to the hospital.
She followed him, running lightly; the only thing she was carrying was the Beretta pistol. Once they were inside the door, Crimson shoved her to the floor. It was instantly apparent why. Gunfire from everywhere in the building and from outside at the checkpoint echoed in the corridors. There were flashes from gun muzzles and bullets everywhere. The body of a woman, a nurse, her legs spread wide, her hijab covered with blood, lay in the hallway.
She followed Crimson, his big body shielding her, and the rest of A Team Bravo as they ran through the hallways, checking rooms one by one. In one they found sick children huddled on the floor with a nurse next to the lifeless body of an Iraqi in a white smock; a doctor, she thought. She didn’t see A Team Alpha or Captain Mullins and assumed they had gone on ahead, maybe to another floor. One of the other Bravo team members by the staircase indicated they had cleared this floor and pointed for them to go up to the next floor.
They ran up the stairs and swept into a ward filled with beds, with no one in them. All the children were lying on the floor, where nurses and aides crawled from one to another. Some of the children had been shot with bullets that had ripped through shattered windows and walls on the Haifa Street side of the building. They were crying and screaming, and as she ran she nearly stepped on a small boy—he must have been three or four—clutching his stomach, trying to hold the blood in and shrieking at the top of his lungs: “Ama! Ama!” Mommy! Mommy! And she thought, This is hell. This is what it’s like.
Someone, an insurgent coming out of nowhere, ran by the doorway, then came back and fired an AKM at them. As Carrie hit the ground, Crimson turned, aimed and fired back in a single fluid motion, killing him instantly, grunting as he did so.
“You okay?” she asked. She couldn’t believe how Crimson had done it. He had an incredible natural athleticism and was amazingly fast and graceful for such a big man.
“Bullet. Hit my vest,” he said, meaning his Kevlar vest, not pausing. He charged out the door, whirled and fired at someone else in the hallway. She didn’t follow. She’d only be in his way; he’d come back for her, she decided, keeping her Beretta ready in case someone else came through the doorway.
She crawled to the wall beside the shattered window and, getting up on her knees, peeked out above the broken shards of window glass at the checkpoint below. It seemed like there was shooting coming from everywhere. An Abrams tank by the checkpoint was blackened and burning; next to it was the shattered chassis of what might have been a car or truck. Car bomb. That must have been the explosion they’d heard at the Convention Center, she thought numbly.
A pair of Abrams tanks, their machine guns blazing, followed by scores of American infantrymen, were moving forward slowly from the checkpoint. A group of the mujahideen appeared to have taken cover in a grassy, parklike area on Haifa, north of the Yafa Street intersection, blasting away from behind bushes and trees, although there was also shooting coming from a handful of buildings on both sides of the street, including from the hospital itself, farther down to the right of her.
Behind the mujahideen in the park, blocking their escape, were two Bradley APCs, one coming down Haifa Street from behind the mujahideen, the other on Yafa, closing in from al-Jumariyah Bridge, trapping the mujahideen in the park from all sides. Both Bradleys were firing their guns nonstop. Suddenly, a bullet cracked through the wall right next to her and she dove back down to the floor.
Idiot, she told herself. You want to get killed? She looked around. The rest of the team had presumably gone out of the ward and farther down the hallway, where she could hear the sound of shooting. She stepped out into the hallway and someone grabbed her from behind, his arm around her throat. She cried out and tried to twist her arm so her Beretta was pointing back at him and felt him twist the pistol out of her hand. He was too strong for her.
He dragged her backward toward the stairs, half choking her. Struggling to get free, she jabbed him with her elbow. He grunted as she felt it connect but tightened his hold on her. She couldn’t see his face—his sleeve was white; he was wearing a doctor’s smock—but she could smell him. A sour smell of sweat and fear. As he pulled her back toward the stairs, she saw Crimson come out of a doorway, heading back looking for her.
“Help!” she cried out. Whoever was holding her put the Beretta to her head.
“Eskoot!” he hissed. Shut up.
Crimson snapped into a kneeling shooting position with his M4. “Let her go!” he shouted.
“Drop it or I kill her!” the man shouted back. “Put it down now or she’s dead!”
Crimson aimed his M4, utterly still.
“Crimson! Take the shot! I trust you!” Carrie shouted.
“I’m warning—” the man holding her started to say.
Crimson fired. Carrie literally felt the bullet pass he
r cheek and an instant later, the man’s arm fell away. He dropped to the floor; she was free. She bent over and took her Beretta from the dead mujahideen in a doctor’s smock, who lay on his side, staring at nothing, a bullet hole in his forehead.
“Thanks—” she started to say to Crimson.
“Stay with me, damn it, ma’am. Captain Mullins’ll kill me if anything happens to you,” he said, and, grabbing her hand, pulled her to follow him.
They ran toward the rest of A Team Bravo. They were coming out of an operating room, shaking their heads. She and Crimson went toward them, but one of the soldiers stopped her.
“You don’t want to see, ma’am. They were just little kids. Two nurses and kids. All dead,” he said. “Believe me, that’s a sight that’ll stay with you.”
“Come on, you sons a bitches,” Master Sergeant Travis shouted from the stairway. “We got two more floors.”
“Have you seen Abu Ubaida?” Carrie called out.
“We killed eight hajis. You can check them later,” Travis said.
She followed Travis and the team to the top floor, where a firefight was going on. A team member fired his grenade launcher through an open doorway and the explosion was followed by a rush of team members racing into the ward, their MP5 submachine guns blazing. The sound of shooting was deafening. Travis and a Sergeant Colfax held back. Travis pointed with his submachine gun to a doorway marked “Roof” in Arabic and English. They opened the door and went up a metal stairway to a roof door.
Travis tried the door. It was locked. He took out a hand grenade and motioned to Crimson, the biggest man there. Crimson nodded, set himself and launched a kick that sent the door flying open, with Travis tossing a grenade through the opening the second Crimson kicked it.
They all moved down a step or two on the staircase as the grenade exploded outside on the roof. Travis and the team immediately rushed out onto the roof, where a hail of AKM gunfire greeted them. Carrie hung back in the stairwell, Crimson half in the doorway, blocking her view as he fired. Someone fired or tossed a grenade and the explosion echoed in the stairwell. She heard the stutter of another AKM opening up and heard someone cry out, “I’m hit!”
Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 26
