Into Darkness

by Richard Fox

  “Easy for you to say. You’ve got a combat patch and a CAB,” she said as she pointed at the Combat Action Badge pinned to the breast of Ritter’s rumpled uniform top. It was a black badge of a bayonet and a grenade surrounded by an incomplete oval wreath. Davis slapped her right shoulder, a blank Velcro patch beneath an American flag. “I’m still a slick sleeve,” she said, invoking Soldier slang for someone without a combat patch.

  “The enemy decides when you earn a CAB,” Ritter said.

  “How did you get…” Davis trailed off. Ritter let the faux pas slide; asking about combat awards was frowned upon, as the stories behind them were always painful and never worth bragging about.

  “I…I still want to go out.” Davis’s face burned with embarrassment as she said this, her face a few shades closer to her hair color.

  Ritter smiled. “Then who will juggle the drones while we’re on the objective? You’re the best in the brigade; we need you in that operations center more than we need you in a Humvee seat.”

  “Yeah…I suppose you’re right.” She crossed her arms and glanced out the window down the long line of CHUs.

  Ritter threaded his bootlace through a hole in the dog tag and shook the bootlace until the tag stopped halfway down the lace. He tucked the tag above the throat line and re-laced the boot. Cindy watched, her head slightly cocked to the side.

  “What are you doing?”

  “An old habit from the days before armored Humvees but still useful.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Ritter pulled the laces tight, the dog tag barely visible beneath the laces. “There are two meanings. One is spiritual and the other is practical. The spiritual meaning you have to figure out for yourself. As for the practical, the dog tag will identify my body if my head is blown off.”

  The words hung in the room as Davis’s mouth half opened and closed.

  “But that won’t happen to you!” she yelled.

  Ritter shrugged his shoulders and crammed his foot into the boot. “It’s not up to me.” He reached into a tiny nightstand by the head of his bed and pulled out a black marker. He handed it to Davis. “Do me a favor? Write my battle roster number and blood type on me.” Ritter hiked up his right sleeve and pointed at his deltoid.

  Davis snapped the cap off. “What’s your number?”

  “E-R zero four nine two, A POS.” The battle roster number was simple: the first letter of a Soldier’s first and last names and the last four numbers of his or her social security number. The code helped track injured or dead personnel as they were evacuated across the battlefield.

  Davis wrote the code with the caustic-smelling marker. Filthy and bloodstained uniforms didn’t last long in an operating room. Severed limbs from IED strikes were common, and Soldiers so injured in Iraq needed massive amounts of blood transfusions to keep them alive. Having one’s blood type conspicuously visible might save precious minutes in an emergency room. Ritter pulled his shirt off and turned to face Davis.

  “One last time.” He tapped his chest.

  Davis silently admired Ritter’s well-built chest as a wry smile crossed her lips. “Was this your plan all along?”

  Ritter’s ensuing chuckle nearly fouled the battle roster transcription. “The truly dedicated have their roster number tattooed,” he said.

  Davis stepped back and recapped the marker. Her glance caught a jagged, pencil-thick scar running down Ritter’s side as he put his undershirt and ACU top on.

  “Time to get going. Is your roommate out there already?” he asked as he lifted his armor over his head and dropped it onto his shoulders.

  “Yeah, that’s half the reason I stopped by. Your roommate and my roommate are in my CHU, and they’re…”

  Ritter attached his rifle to the D ring clip on his armor. “They’re…what?”

  For an intelligence officer, Davis thought, Ritter could be pretty stupid sometimes. “They’re doing…it.”

  Ritter held his poker face. “Well, good for them.” He scooped up his helmet and pack. “Shall we?” Davis raised an eyebrow at the question.

  “Leave!” Ritter said. “Shall we leave, I mean.”

  Davis giggled as she opened the door, and they stepped out into the heat. A sidewalk of wooden pallets ran between the double rows of identical CHUs. They walked in silence toward the gap in the CHUs and the outer wall of tall, concrete barriers meant to protect against the enemy’s errant rockets. From the air, the CHU village looked like a cookie-cutter suburb, a little bit of Americana recreated in aluminum siding and plasterboard.

  During the long walk to brigade headquarters, they discussed the vagaries of the Iraqi weather and speculated about whether the heat and blowing sand might cancel the mission. A long line of tan vehicles stretched across the front of the building. Soldiers mingled between the vehicles, ready to go half an hour early. It was a mortal sin to be late for any operation, especially one with as many moving parts as this rescue.

  Ritter scanned bumper numbers for his assigned vehicle, spotting it toward the back of the line. “That’s me down there,” he said.

  Davis reached out and grabbed Ritter’s forearm. “You stay safe out there. Hear me?”

  Ritter nodded. He opened his mouth to pass on some sort of reassurance but couldn’t.

  Davis gave his forearm a quick squeeze, then turned and walked through the double doors. Ritter watched her go, his Zen-like state disrupted by a tinge of longing and affection for Davis. Now he had something to come back to. Now he had a complication.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  Abu Ahmet thrust his shovel into the ground and flicked the load to the side. He waited a moment as Theeb and his cousin Khalil scooped more dirt from the deepening hole. Abu Ahmet cursed their slowness as he scooped out another shovelful of the gray-white dirt. He cursed al-Qaida for giving him a single shovel to bury so many bombs. He cursed the heat, which sapped his strength, and he cursed himself for agreeing to this task.

  Khalil used his hands like a digging dog to scoop out another mound of dirt, then tested the depth with his forearm. He looked up at Abu Ahmet, a dribble of sweat hanging from his nose. “That’s deep enough, right?”

  Abu Ahmet nodded and waved to a distant shell of a building. Samir came running from behind a pillar, a large, blue jug in either hand. Abu Ahmet winced as Samir dropped a jug, nearly tripping over it as he struggled to pick it back up.

  “Does he know those are filled with explosives?” Theeb asked in a shaky voice. His eyes were bloodshot, and his hands opened and closed of their own volition as he leaped to his feet.

  “Go help him before he kills us all,” Abu Ahmet said. Theeb raced off with too much spark for a miserable day like this. He must have had some of Samir’s pills, Abu Ahmet thought. No matter. He’d deal with them both once they got home.

  Abu Ahmet turned his attention to the sky, listening for the telltale buzz of an American drone or the low pulse of their helicopters. He heard the encroaching footfalls of Theeb and Samir, which did nothing for his growing paranoia. Mukhtar assured him the Americans were coming in force, and they always brought their drones.

  Theeb returned first, sliding his jug into the hole. Samir was a few steps behind him, wheezing from the effort. He fell onto his hands and knees as Theeb snatched the final jug, placing it on top of the first. Khalil and Theeb quickly refilled the hole with dirt as Samir unscrewed the cap of the upper jug and placed a blasting cap into the oil-stained explosives within. Abu Ahmet took a pair of batteries, held together by black electrical tape, from his pocket and handed them to Samir, who took his time rigging them to the blasting cap with copper wire.

  A low buzz piggybacked onto a gust of wind as Samir worked. It stopped as the wind died down. Abu Ahmet froze in fear. “What was that?”

  Samir tensed up and nearly dropped the battery pack. “It was almost ka-boom! Let me finish my work, and we can get the hell out of here.” Samir kept a low metronome of curses going as he twisted the wire onto the
battery. He pulled a wooden dowel, wrapped in lamp cord, from his belt and attached the cord to the battery. He stood and walked back to the ruined building as he unwound the cord and spray-painted the same off white as the sand and dirt bordering the road.

  Abu Ahmet kept listening for the drone as he ran back to the building, outpacing the younger Khalil and the chemically enhanced Theeb. He didn’t fear the Americans in a stand-up fight, but their missiles brought swift and sure death. The three hid behind the crumbling brick walls, waiting for Samir to join them.

  Samir wrapped the cord around a nail in the wall to anchor the line and tossed the end of the cord against the wall. He drank from a plastic bottle he’d left against the wall. “I’m the one who rigged the main building for Mukhtar. I’m the one who puts all these bombs together. Why do I have to be the one carrying everything?” he said.

  “We wouldn’t be out here at all if you hadn’t volunteered us to be al-Qaida’s little bitches,” Khalil said.

  Abu Ahmet slapped the back of Khalil’s head. “When I want shit from you, I’ll squeeze your head.”

  He pointed at a two-story building farther away from the road. “We run the wire to there and wait. After the Americans reach Mukhtar’s gift we can leave.” Abu Ahmet picked up his AK-47 from against the wall.

  “Allah akbar, let’s go.”

  Lieutenant Kovalenko scanned the distant power plant through his binoculars. He knew he’d heard an explosion, but he couldn’t find the languid cloud of dust and smoke marking the epicenter. The distant power plant showed no signs of activity either. He’d heard an explosion, as had the rest of the platoon, minutes ago. The company and battalion radio chatter offered no clues. Explosions in Iraq came with a very simple set of scripted reactions: If you hear the explosion, don’t worry about it. If you see the explosion, you have a problem. If you feel the blast, consider yourself damn lucky. If the explosion hits you, your worries are over.

  Kovalenko did his best to appear calm, cool, and collected in front of his platoon, but the explosion set him on edge. If the explosion hit one of the distant battalions, the explosion must have been huge. A bomb that big meant forethought, planning. It meant the insurgents were waiting for them. He slid back into the dried-out canal where he and his platoon waited in the heat. He glanced at Channing.

  “For the record, sir, this mission is bullshit,” Nesbitt said as he lounged against the concrete wall of the canal.

  “We’re trying to get Brown and O’Neal back. What’s bullshit about that?” the radioman asked Nesbitt.

  “Not that. I mean us being the outer cordon. Why are the other battalions going in to get our guys?” Nesbitt said.

  “Tell me, Nesbitt. What would you do if we go in there and find the bastards that took Brown and O’Neal? The same bastards that killed everyone else in Rock Squad?” Kovalenko asked.

  Nesbitt clenched his jaw as he spat, “I’d cut their balls off and stuff them down their throats!”

  Kovalenko nodded. “That’s why we’re the outer cordon.”

  Sergeant First Class Young jogged over in a half crouch, stopping next to Kovalenko. His forehead was rimmed with salt from constant perspiration. “Sir, water discipline is tight, but we’re going to have problems if we stay out here all damn day.”

  Kovalenko had the same concerns, but Captain Shelton was adamant that their position remain static. “I’m with you, but this is the best route for hajjis to sneak out of the power plant.”

  “Maybe we can cycle squads through the shade. There’s a palm grove a hundred meters away,” Young said.

  Kovalenko knew this tone: Young’s polite suggestion was his way of training Kovalenko to be a better platoon leader.

  Kovalenko drummed his finger against the butt of his rifle. “You think there’s any risk of fratricide? Those buildings nearest to us will be searched eventually.”

  “Hell, sir. Do I look like a terrorist?” Young said.

  Shelton was closer to the power plant, managing the influx of support vehicles behind the clearing force. Micromanaging Kovalenko’s squads was probably the furthest thing from his mind. Kovalenko took the radio mike from Channing. “Dragon Six, this is Dragon One-Six…”

  “Gunner! We’re passing friendlies,” Captain Jennifer Mattingly yelled. The Humvee gunner raised the barrel of his huge grenade launcher until the weapon clanked against the pintle mount. Ritter heard the scrape of the gunner’s rifle against the cupola as the gunner took up his secondary weapon. Ritter hadn’t caught the gunner’s name, but he’d had a good look at his knees and boots during the long drive from the brigade headquarters to wherever they were now.

  Ritter leaned forward and looked out the inches-thick ballistic glass making up the too-small window of his door. A beige strip of sand and dirt extended from the blacktop out to a fallow field. The view hadn’t changed much since the mission kicked off hours ago. This part of Iraq boasted farms, reed-choked canals, and messy death.

  Mattingly had the only working set of headphones in the vehicles, so the only details Ritter had about the day’s events came from her infrequent updates. She had three different radio frequencies to monitor but could listen to only one at a time. The two other pairs of headsets had broken minutes after the convoy left their base. Ritter wasn’t surprised; their Humvee probably hadn’t been outside the wire since the deployment started, and it had been pressed into service only to carry the extra number of enablers for the mission.

  Ritter was thankful the Humvee hadn’t broken down…yet…and that the air conditioner worked.

  The mission hadn’t gone as planned, which was a surprise to no one. The outer security cordon was incomplete. The infantry battalion tasked with cutting off the enemy’s escape route along the riverbank had run into several IEDs. The bomb-disposal team had reported an improvised minefield of undetermined size blocking the advance. Legal enablers had vetoed the use of a massive lane-clearing charge, since the division commander hadn’t preapproved its use.

  Ritter unlatched the bottom of his armor and lifted the front plate, airing out the sauna-hot air. A peal of distant gunshots sent a jolt through the vehicle’s occupants. Ritter seized his rifle and rested his thumb against the selector switch as he peered out the tiny porthole. He immediately felt both stupid and useless. The heavy steel door between him and any enemy made him capable of little more than moral support in a firefight.

  Tense minutes passed. The gunner crouched low, peeking over his armored turret every so often. Mattingly kept a single headphone pressed against her ear, the other hand grasping the butt of her holstered pistol. Sibilant commands escaped the unused earpiece.

  “Anything, ma’am?” the driver asked.

  Mattingly held up a finger, then keyed her hand mike. “Roger, Dragon Six. I have an interpreter in my vehicle and can get him to you,” she said into the microphone. She nodded along with whatever instructions she received, then took the headphone away from her ear. She squirmed in her seat until she faced Ritter, who sat directly behind her. She wiped strands of sweat-soaked hair from her face and shared a smile with Ritter that beamed happiness.

  “Dragon picked up a detainee, and they need your durka-durka skills. Ready to go?” she asked. Smart-ass responses played in his mind, but Ritter kept his mouth shut and nodded. Her positive energy was a welcome foil to his undercurrent of anxiety.

  She flipped around and tried to peek around the ass end of the ambulance in front of them. “Driver, pull off the road. We’ll hug the shoulder on our way down,” she said.

  The driver, a private first class just out of his teens, spat a wad of chewing tobacco into a water bottle. He looked at Mattingly as if she’d just told him to stop a chain saw with his face. “Ma’am, the hardball road is—”

  “Safer, yes. We need to deliver the good captain right now. There are twenty vehicles ahead of us. If hajji wanted to pop us, he would have done it.” She clapped her gloved hands twice. “Let’s move.” A hint of irritation crept into her vo
ice.

  The driver nodded and pulled onto the shoulder. Gravel squealed and popped under the Humvee’s weight. Fine dust leaped into the air in their wake, destined to turn the hot air into an oppressive haze. Ritter stared out his window, looking for some sign of the prisoner or any sign of life in the vast complex. They passed dozens of beige-and-tan vehicles until a Soldier slipped from between the convoy and flagged them down.

  They stopped as the Soldier trotted to the driver’s door, keeping their vehicle between him and any enemy who might be watching from the power plant. The Soldier yanked the driver’s door open and stuck his head in. The moon dust, in Soldier parlance, gave his face a zombie pallor. Bright eyes locked on Ritter.

  “Enti tecqi arabi?” (Do you speak Arabic?) he asked. Ritter winced at his accent, but at least he was trying.

  “Na’am” (Yes), Ritter answered as he unlatched his belt and opened his door. The air smelled of diesel and the chalky moon dust as it washed over him.

  “Have a good time.” She winked at him as he left. He gave her a quick nod and slammed the armored door shut; the momentum was enough to shatter an errant finger. The Soldier, who was a head taller than Ritter, trotted around the Humvee and pointed to a distant knot of Soldiers next to a brick building.

  “I’m Lieutenant Park. I’ll take you to Captain Shelton.” He slapped Ritter on the shoulder and started jogging toward the brick building. Ritter kept up, thankful that his many hours at the gym gave him the strength to haul all this gear at the pace set by Park’s annoyingly long legs. Park was easily the tallest Korean he’d ever met. Ritter’s gear undulated as they ran, the disharmony pounding his armor onto his hips and shoulders. Ritter focused on the Soldiers milling around a blue-clad form, who sat against a brick wall.