“Blue Six to Blue Tree,” he said. “Tree, it’s your perimeter. We’re going in.”
“Roger that, Captain.”
Jackson clicked off and looked at Fahd. “Ready, Colonel?”
Fahd flicked away his cigarette. “As you like, Captain.”
CRADLING HIS M16, J.C. crept along the building toward the door of the barbershop. Corporal Voss, Captain Jackson’s driver, hid a few feet away on the other side of the store’s busted-out front window. The Iraqi cops were a half step behind him, which J.C. didn’t like. They had no way to communicate if something went wrong. But Captain Jackson had ordered it.
The shop had been quiet since the grenade. But unless it had gone off on its own, guys were still alive in there. J.C. poked his head around the corner of the door to check inside. The store looked like a tornado had blown through it: mirrors cracked to shreds, barber chairs flipped over, and two bodies lying on the floor. Then he saw the door at the back of the shop, open an inch, a shadow fluttering behind. He looked at Voss to be sure Voss had seen too. Voss pointed at J.C., then back at himself. J.C. nodded, and just like that they had a plan.
Voss held out three fingers. Two. One.
J.C. ran across the front of the store toward Voss, a motion guaranteed to draw fire. Sure enough, the door opened and a guy stepped out, AK in hand. Voss shot, popping the guy — a huge man with some kind of sword attached to his belt, J.C. saw as he ran — in the shoulder before he could get a round off. The guy spun around and went down as J.C. dived for cover behind Voss.
“Go!” Jackson yelled at the Iraqis. The cops poured into the store, firing wildly, skidding on the pools of blood and bone fragments scattered across the floor. The first cop, the lieutenant colonel, stepped into the back room. A second cop followed, then — BOOM! The store shook as a grenade exploded somewhere in the back, sending metal shards over J.C.’s head. The cop who’d been in the doorway was blown backward by the blast. He landed on his back and didn’t get up.
J.C. crept into the store, Voss a step behind him. He heard only a faint moaning from the back room, and he didn’t think anyone could have survived that second grenade in shape to fight. But he wasn’t taking any chances. Anything that moved was going down. Then Captain Jackson stepped past him and strode toward the door.
“Sir,” J.C. said. Too late. Jackson was inside.
FAHD WAS DEAD. Jackson knew as soon as he stepped into the back room. The shrapnel from the grenade had shredded Fahd’s chest; his uniform, once a powder blue, was stained wine-dark with his blood. Even body armor might not have saved him. His legs were torn apart, the left one blown in half at the knee. Only his face was undamaged, its expression strangely peaceful. He seemed to have died instantly. But in the corner under the stairs another man had not quite stopped moving, a huge jihadi who had avoided the worst of the grenade.
Jackson knew he should call a medic for the guy, insurgent or no. Then he looked again at Fahd and decided to wait. Someone touched his arm. He turned, startled, to see J.C.
“Sir. It’s not secure.”
J.C. pointed to the stairs. J.C. was right, Jackson thought. He shouldn’t have been the first man in this room. He wouldn’t be much use to his Mad Dogs dead. He pointed to the stairs. “You and Voss,” he said. “Go.”
FAROUK AND ZAYD crept along the roof, trying to find a way down while staying hidden from the American soldiers who surrounded that block beneath them. From the street, the storefronts looked like part of a single big building, but up here it was clear that each store had been built separately. Walls separated the roof of the barbershop from its neighbors. In one corner, someone had shoved an empty cigarette pack and a no-name condom wrapper into a hole in the roof’s concrete. Both were yellowed from months in the sun.
Zayd clambered over the wall to the north. Farouk struggled to follow. He came over the wall to see Zayd pulling on a locked door. Beyond it the roof was flat, no staircases down.
The low thump of a grenade sounded from the barbershop. Mazen must have made his last stand, Farouk thought. Zayd seemed unfazed. He turned around and climbed back over the wall they had just scaled. But Farouk felt his spirits sag. They wouldn’t get off this roof unless Allah himself sent a chariot.
J.C. HUSTLED to the top of the stairs, where a door to the roof hung crookedly, its lock shot open. Voss was just behind him. J.C. kicked the door open and spun right. Voss followed and moved left. J.C. saw two men climbing a wall thirty feet away. But before he could follow, Voss kicked over a grenade that Zayd had tied to the door as an improvised booby trap. The grenade’s handle locked in place.
“Down!” Voss screamed. He desperately kicked at the grenade. J.C. dropped to the roof and covered his face. The world turned upside down as he felt an explosion so loud that it seemed to come from inside his head.
J.C. crawled behind the door toward Voss, but Voss didn’t seem to be there anymore. At least not in one piece. Something else was wrong too. The world had gone silent. “WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?” J.C. yelled. Or imagined he did. “WHO? WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?”
J.C. stood and tried to fire at the guys who’d gone over the wall, but his rifle wasn’t working. Fuck this, J.C. thought. He pulled his pistol and charged the wall just as two more Mad Dogs came up the stairs. They yelled for him to stop, but he couldn’t hear them. Even if he had, he would have kept running.
THEY WERE TRAPPED, Farouk could see that now. A crazy American soldier ran toward them carrying only a pistol, as Zayd made a last stand, his AK on full automatic, shells pouring out, the gun jumping crazily in his hands, scattering rounds through the night.
Farouk stepped backward. He wanted to surrender, but Zayd would kill him if he tried. He would wait for Zayd to be shot and then, if he was still alive, put his hands up like he had seen in the movies. He supposed he was a coward after all. But he preferred a Guantánamo prison cell to dying on this roof.
The American staggered but then kept coming, firing away. A shot hit Zayd in the shoulder. And just like that the American was over the wall. Zayd turned toward him and kept shooting. Farouk couldn’t believe that he had missed. But the soldier seemed invulnerable. He raised his pistol and fired, hitting Zayd in the chest, then squeezed the trigger again and again.
Farouk dropped the Geiger counter and raised his hands. The soldier was already turning toward him. “Surrender,” Farouk said. “Give up. Give up.”
THE FAT MAN was saying something, but J.C. couldn’t hear him. He aimed his pistol squarely at the guy’s chest and pulled the trigger.
THE GUN CLICKED, and Farouk waited for his chest to explode, for the blackness — or whatever happened next — to take him. He ought to feel close to Allah right now. Instead he felt very far away.
Another click. Nothing happened. Farouk sank to his knees and realized he was still alive.
J.C. STARED stupidly at the guy, then at his pistol, which didn’t seem to be working anymore. Out of ammo. Must be. All the adrenaline in his body evaporated at once. Instead of reloading he dropped his pistol and leaned forward until his face was only inches from the other man’s, the fat man quivering, mouthing words that J.C. couldn’t hear or understand, flecks of his spit flying onto J.C.’s uniform. J.C. wanted to tell the guy something, but he couldn’t remember what.
They stayed that way until Captain Jackson pulled J.C. back.
BODY ARMOR MIGHT not have saved Lt. Col. Fahd, but it had sure saved J. C. Ramirez. His Kevlar had stopped two rounds. For his busted-out eardrums, J.C. got an early ticket home, though he desperately wanted to stay with his buddies. For killing six insurgents and attacking in the face of close-range enemy fire, he wound up with the Distinguished Service Cross, a military award second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor.
As far as Jackson was concerned, J.C. deserved the big one. The kid was the best soldier he’d ever seen. But Takahashi, the battalion commander, said that some senior officers wanted to keep the raid quiet. A Medal of Honor would attract attentio
n. Jackson wasn’t surprised, considering how quickly the guys from Task Force 121 had shown up after he radioed in that his company had captured a man carrying a Geiger counter and a Pakistani passport. They had stuffed the guy into one of their Humvees and told Jackson to take the guerrillas’ bodies and cars back to Camp Graphite for inspection. Like he was their damn errand boy.
“We’ll make sure you get credit for this,” said one of them, a Special Forces officer who called himself a colonel though his uniform had no badges at all. Like credit was all Jackson should care about, and Fahd and Voss didn’t matter at all. Jackson hated losing one of his own. Two, depending on how you thought about it.
But when he crashed out on his cot the morning after the raid, the sun already up and the heat rising, Jackson had to admit that he was proud of his company. All these TF 121 guys running around and it was the Mad Dogs who scored. He would make sure his men understood what they had done, even if they weren’t allowed to talk about it. Missions like this were the reason they had shipped off to this hellhole. They had disrupted al Qaeda, taken the fight to the terrorists instead of the other way around.
Jackson folded his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Amped up as he was, he knew he needed to sleep. He was supposed to brief a couple of one-stars on the raid tomorrow. Not bad for a twenty-nine-year-old captain. I just hope intel knows what to do with this guy we caught, Jackson thought, as he finally drifted to sleep. And I hope it’s not too late.
7
Atlanta, Georgia
BROWN-SKINNED MEN with cheap mesh caps and hungry eyes stood in clusters in the giant parking lot. Though the sun had risen only an hour before, already the air was hot and sticky, and the men moved slowly, conserving their energy for the long day ahead. But their apparent lethargy was deceiving. When a pickup truck turned into the lot, the men swarmed it in seconds.
A red-faced man in a short-sleeved shirt leaned out of the truck, pushing back the crowd. “Chill, wetbacks.” The men grumbled but gave ground. The man in the truck held up four fingers. “Four guys. All day,” he said. “Eighty bucks each. Anybody speak English?”
John Wells shouldered through the crowd. “I do.”
“You,” the man said. “Up front.” He pointed to three other laborers. “You. You. You. In back.”
As the other men trudged away, Wells hustled into the pickup, a red Chevy crew cab with commercial plates and a white-painted slogan: LEE’S LANDSCAPING: BEAUTIFYING ATLANTA SINCE1965. “What’s your name?” the guy said.
“Jesse.”
“I’m Dale. You speak Spanish?”
“Little bit,” Wells said. “Poquito.”
“Keep these guys in line, you get an extra twenty.”
“Sí, señor.”
Dale laughed. “Sí, señor? That’s funny.”
The truck nosed out of the lot and onto the Buford Highway, Route 13, a crowded six-lane road that ran from Atlanta to the northeastern suburbs of Chamblee and Doraville. Wells hadn’t known what to expect from Atlanta when he’d arrived in April. Outside of his brief stint in the army, he had never spent time in the South. He had vague visions of Scarlett O’Hara and Martin Luther King. Atlanta had surprised him. The city was bigger than he expected, blending into suburbs that sprawled over the low Georgia hills for miles in every direction. And it was not just black and white, as he had pictured, but filled with Hispanics and Asians and even a few Arabs.
Especially here, the Buford Highway, a mélange of strip malls with signs in Vietnamese and Japanese and languages Wells had never seen. Taquerias and Korean saunas and the First Intercontinental Bank—“Tu Banco Local”—sat beside a Comfort Inn and Waffle House, relics of a more familiar America. A mile north was the Buford Farmers Market, which despite its bucolic name catered to Central American immigrants, selling oxtails and bulls’ testicles wrapped in plastic for $2.99 a pound.
The locals called Chamblee “Chambodia,” but that term hardly captured its variety. The Buford Highway was post-American America, the United States at its ugly, tacky best, accepting — if not quite welcoming — immigrants of every color, Wells thought. More practically, it was a good place to hide. Anybody who wanted to work could make a living here, and the landlords didn’t fuss over renting to people whose papers weren’t quite in order. They welcomed anyone who paid on time and kept quiet, like Wells.
So for four months he had lived in a furnished one-bedroom apartment just off the highway. Every morning he took his place among the Guatemalans and Nicaraguans waiting for work at the parking lot. At first they had suspected him of being an immigration agent or a cop and refused to talk to him, but lately they had loosened up a bit. They still didn’t really like him; he got picked for more than his share of jobs because he was white and spoke English.
But Wells figured he knew how to be an outsider. Another fake name, another new identity, another endless wait for orders. He sometimes wondered what guys like Dale the landscaper would do if he told them who he really was. Laugh, probably—“That’s funny”—and tell him to get back to work.
THEY HEADED WEST on I-285, the ring road that surrounds Atlanta, leaving the grit of Doraville behind as they passed the giant Perimeter Mall, a shopping center the size of a small city. Even now Wells couldn’t get used to the casual wealth of America, the gleaming opulence of cars and office buildings. At exit 24, Sandy Springs, they turned off 285, and a few minutes later Dale swung onto a culde-sac with four newly built homes that grandly proclaimed itself HIDDEN HILLTOP LANE: A PRIVATE DRIVE. A truck full of saplings awaited them, along with a teenager wearing a Jeff Gordon cap.
“Kyle,” Dale said to the kid.
“Wassup, Dale.” They exchanged a complex, fluid handshake.
“Got you some Mexicans,” Dale said. “This here’s John. He speaks Spanish — he’ll tell ’em what to do.”
Wells’s heart thumped. How could Dale possibly know his real name?
“Jesse,” Wells said.
“Whatever,” Dale said. “Long as you can dig a hole.”
Wells could only shake his head. This cracker had just given him his biggest scare in months.
Dale pointed at the trees in the truck. “Kyle’ll show you where to put them,” he said. “Make sure you get the roots in deep.”
THEY STOPPED FOR lunch around noon, hiding from the sun by the side of the house. The Guatemalans unwrapped homemade tamales and bottles of warm beer; Wells pulled out a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, his secret vice. He munched on a greasy, salty drumstick and rolled his tired shoulders, trying to stay loose. He had sweated through his shirt, but he didn’t mind the work. Months of digging and hammering had given him back the muscles that had disappeared in the North-West Frontier.
Wells tilted the bucket of chicken toward the Guatemalans. “You want?”
One of the men reached toward the bucket, then stopped.
“It’s okay,” Wells said. “Really.”
The guy took a drumstick. “Gracias.”
“Quien es tu nombre?”
“Eduardo. Tú?”
“Jesse.”
“You work every day.”
“Sí,” Wells said.
“But you white.”
“Looks that way,” Wells said. The beginnings of a smile formed on Eduardo’s face, then disappeared.
“And you no inmigración.”
“No.”
Eduardo looked puzzled as he tried to understand why a norteamericano would be stuck working with them. Wells had had this conversation, or something similar, a dozen times. It always stopped here. These men respected privacy and, anyway, most of them didn’t know enough English to push further. Sure enough, Eduardo finished off the last of his chicken in silence.
“Gracias,” he said again, and turned back to the other Guatemalans.
Wells leaned against the wall and looked at the houses around him, broad and tall, with three- and four-car garages attached. Each one probably had fifteen rooms. For one family. Amaz
ing, he thought. Someone would be glad to live here, or ought to be.
THEY FINISHED UP around five o’clock, with the clouds thickening, promising a heavy summer downpour. “Anybody want a cigarette?” Kyle asked. He walked over to his truck — and suddenly hopped in and pulled away. “Later, bitches,” he said. Just like that he was gone. The Guatemalans chased the truck but gave up as it disappeared down Mount Vernon.
“Maricón,” Eduardo yelled uselessly down the road. “Fucking puta.”
This had happened to Wells once before. Most contractors kept their word, because they were honest or because they knew that word would get out if they didn’t. But some were real pricks. Wells wanted to put a rock through a window of one of these fancy houses. But Dale might show up at the Kermex lot with the cops, and nobody could risk that. Least of all Wells. He tossed the box of fried chicken on the lawn — maybe the smell would attract raccoons.
They walked for miles down Mount Vernon in rain that turned into a full-on thunderstorm. Wells forced himself to stick with Eduardo and the others, though he worried that a cop might pick them up. Sandy Springs was the richest suburb in Atlanta, and its police didn’t look kindly on brown men wandering the streets. For long stretches, the road had no shoulder or sidewalks, and twice they were forced to jump into brush to avoid speeding SUVs.
Finally they reached 285 and waited interminably for a bus. From now on Wells was bringing twenty bucks and his cell phone on these jobs, so he could call a cab if he got ditched. He had been colder and hungrier plenty of times, but he couldn’t remember being quite so furious. He expected more from his country. Beside him the Guatemalans chattered away until finally Wells tapped Eduardo’s shoulder. “You speak English?” Wells said.
Eduardo smiled. “Good as you speak Spanish.”
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