Into Darkness

by Richard Fox

  The female doctor, a gray-haired, frail-looking major named Sutherland, hadn’t protested when they left early. She’d made it very clear during the drive from Victory that she had better things to do than catch tuberculosis from the Iraqis. She complained nonstop about the living conditions at Patrol Base Dragon and compared everything to the hospital she had been so inelegantly dragged from in the Green Zone. Davis had done her best to humor the major until the day was done.

  Their convoy had left the school over half an hour ago and taken a different return route than the one Captain Shelton had briefed them about earlier that morning. The MRAP had stopped ten minutes ago and idled on a dirt road. Naturally, Major Sutherland took the opportunity to mention, for the umpteenth time, that she was a cardiologist and not meant for this sort of medical work.

  Davis finally lost patience and unleashed her restraints. She stepped around her security element, a Jordanian soldier named Rasha, and crept into the forward cab.

  “What’s going on out there? IED in the way?” she asked the sergeant in the commander’s seat.

  “Captain Shelton thinks there’s some high-value target in a house up ahead. They’re about to clear the building right now.” He handed her a set of bulbous headphones. She unsnapped her chin strap and put her helmet between her knees. She was pulling the headphones apart, about to slip them over her ears, when a ripple of gunfire rang out from the compound.

  Davis dropped both her helmet and the headset as her reflexes drove her to cower between the two front seats. Her inverted helmet wobbled on the floor between her feet as she struggled to reach it. Her body armor, designed for a male torso, lent her the mobility of a rusty tin man when prone.

  The gunner spun the turret while shouting down from his cupola, asking for the source of the gunfire. Davis finally grabbed the edge of her helmet and pulled herself to her feet. The headphones beeped at her feet as a flurry of traffic jammed the airwaves. She grabbed the headset and jammed a single headphone against her ear.

  “One military-aged male is down. No medic needed. We’re trying to get positive identification.” She heard Captain Shelton’s voice on the radio along with a keening wail in the background. “Negative on any further. Lieutenant, get those women out of the courtyard!” The wail continued until Shelton ended his transmission. The radio beeped again, and Davis heard her name float through the background of static and shouted Arabic.

  “Blue One-Seven, this is Dragon Six. Get the female translator and security element over here now,” Shelton said through the radio.

  Davis keyed the mike. “Roger, Dragon Six. I monitored; moving.” She handed the headset back to the driver and put her helmet back on.

  She shuffled back into the rear compartment and pointed at Rasha and Jones, another female Soldier brought along to provide security. “They need us inside. Let’s go.”

  Davis, Rasha, and Jones half ran, half trotted along the mud brick wall along the compound. A pair of Soldiers at the corner pointed them toward an open wound of a steel fence, which had been wrenched from its hinges. The wail she’d heard over the radio undulated in intensity like an ambulance siren; it was the sound of women crying.

  Davis stepped around the mangled gate and saw Shelton standing next to a young Soldier, his face ashen. Shelton had his hand on the young man’s shoulder; the other held a radio mike to his ear. When he noticed Davis, he gestured around the side of the interior building toward the source of the cries.

  She hustled around the corner and stopped dead in her tracks. A man lay against the exterior wall, like a drunk who’d decided the base of the mud-and-straw wall was just the place to sleep it off. What remained of his head lolled over onto his shoulder; the rear of his skull had been blown out against the wall at head height. Red viscera dribbled from splatter like a bloody Indian dream catcher.

  She’d never seen a dead body before, and the spectacle wouldn’t let her go. Her feet wouldn’t move, and if her rifle hadn’t been attached to her armor with a D ring, it would have fallen to the ground. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the dead man’s half-there forehead as grayish brain matter from his remaining hemisphere collapsed with agonizing slowness into the sudden vacancy.

  Ritter crouched next to the body, trying to check its fingerprints with a handheld biometrics computer. He seemed unfazed by the affair, as if it were on par with changing a flat tire.

  “Lieutenant!” The shout jolted Davis back into being. She looked over her shoulder at Captain Shelton, his red face covered in sweat. The lamentations were even louder as a woman, wearing a burka that displayed only her face, struck her hands against her head over and over again where she stood just outside a doorway.

  “Lieutenant, get in there and get them under control,” Shelton said.

  “While you’re at it, find out if this guy is Abdul Karim or not,” Ritter said. He rolled one of the corpse’s fingers against the print scanner, a red X error message appeared on the screen. Ritter shook his head and tried a different finger.

  “I thought you said you knew how to do this with a body,” Shelton said.

  Ritter dropped the hand; it flopped onto the body’s thigh, then slid off into the dirt. “This whole thing would have been so much easier if someone hadn’t shot him in the face,” Ritter called back.

  Shelton jammed a finger in Ritter’s direction. “You are one smart-ass remark away from walking back to Victory!”

  Davis grabbed Rasha and led them both out of the line of fire developing between the two captains. Davis walked up to the crying woman, her weather-beaten face puffy from repeated blows, and guided her back inside the home. The interior’s Spartan conditions surprised Davis; the bare concrete walls and floors had no decorations. A pile of rugs and foam mattresses were in the corner of the main room. Another grown woman held two small children in the black wings of her burka as if she were a black mother hen. A girl in her early teens stood next to the cluster, her head down and arms folded as her head bobbed with her sobbing.

  Rasha gave curt commands in Arabic to the woman they’d brought into the home and maneuvered her back to the rest of the Iraqis. The woman began another mournful trill, which the other woman joined and which sent all the children into a new spasm of crying.

  “Rasha, tell them to calm down!” Davis yelled over the din.

  “We just killed her husband or her son—I’m not sure which. You expect her to handle it better?” Rasha said as she reached out and grabbed the older woman’s wrists before the woman could hit herself again. Rasha repeated a question to the woman several times before she finally responded with a shake of her head.

  “No one else is hurt,” Rasha said.

  Davis, feeling less useful as the conversation resumed, looked around the house. There were no interior doors and little in the way of furniture in the other rooms. A wooden armoire stood next to a decrepit bed frame in a distant room, both chipped and warped from age and use.

  “Rasha, what’s the name of the guy we shot?” Davis said.

  Rasha translated the question, and the older woman responded with a peal of lightning-fast Arabic. “She wants to know why we Americans would come into someone’s home and shoot a man if we don’t know who he is.”

  “Is it…..uh, Abdul Karim?” Davis asked. As soon as she said the man’s name, the teenager looked right at the armoire, then back at her feet. A great deal of back-and-forth ensued between the translator and the bereaved. Davis knew little Arabic, but every time Rasha said the name of their target, Abdul Karim, the teenager glanced at the armoire.

  “Why is this taking so long?” Davis asked.

  “These Iraqis are so stupid. The mother said the dead guy is Dawoud, but the old woman insists he’s Abdul Karim, and Dawoud is his nickname or something. How do they not know this?” Rasha continued with the Iraqis, her tone firm as she asked each woman more questions.

  “Jones, why do you think that girl keeps looking at that dresser?” Davis asked. Jones shrugged her shoul
ders, the motion barely visible beneath her oversized body armor.

  “Let’s check it out.” She and Jones entered the bedroom; a battered mattress with once-white sheets took up most of the space. Davis put her hand on the armoire’s knob and motioned for Jones to raise her rifle. Jones hefted her rifle to her shoulder as Davis stepped beside the armoire and yanked the door open.

  A purple dishdasha swung from a hanger; the smell of mothballs blew into the room. Jones lowered her rile and settled the swaying garment.

  “Wow, ma’am. Want me to detain it?” she said with a grin.

  Her expression changed to shock as the dresser fell toward her; she gave a quick yelp as the heavy antique smashed her to the ground, pinning her from sternum to feet. The fall revealed a large hole in the wall. An Iraqi grunted as he struggled to extricate himself from his hiding place, his hair and face plastered with sweat. He lurched out of the hole and fell onto the back of the dresser; he reached for a pistol jammed into his rear waistband.

  Time slowed as the Iraqi pulled his pistol free. Her options limited, Davis did the first thing that came to mind. She swung her helmet into the Iraqi’s face. With no windup, the blow managed to stun the Iraqi, but it was enough. Davis used her newfound second to pull her helmet around for a backhand. The next blow struck with a resounding crack, wrenching his head back over his shoulder. He crumpled into the space between the dresser and the wall. Davis kept her helmet raised over her head, poised to strike again.

  “Get this fucking thing off of me!” Jones cried from beneath the dresser. The Iraqi women were a riot of waving arms and shrill cries. Rasha struggled to keep them from the room, using her rifle to block them.

  Sergeant Young and a pair of Soldiers ran into the home. A Soldier joined Rasha with her crowd-control duty as Young and the other Soldier trained their weapons on the unconscious man.

  “Ma’am, you all right?” Young asked. Davis nodded.

  “Why don’t you put your helmet back on? Give us a hand,” he said as he pulled a zip tie from his armor and quickly bound the Iraqi’s hands behind his back. He tossed the pistol onto the bed and rolled the Iraqi onto his back.

  The Iraqi’s lips were split open. Blood covered his face from his chin along his jawline. A pair of teeth dropped from his mouth onto the dresser, where they tumbled like thrown dice. Young grabbed handfuls of the Iraqi’s shirt and dragged him into the main room.

  “Help, please!” Jones pleaded as she tried to work out from under the trap.

  Young squatted next to the long edge and raised the dresser with hardly a grunt. Davis grabbed Jones by the carry handle at the top of her armor and dragged her clear. Young dropped the dresser with a crash.

  Davis helped Jones to her feet; she seemed no worse for wear.

  “Ma’am, that was badass,” Jones said.

  “What?”

  “He was going to shoot us.” She pointed to the gun lying on the bed. Davis picked up the gun, which was surprisingly light in her hand. An emblazoned seal of Saddam Hussein’s face was on the handgrip.

  “Cindy, I need that,” Ritter said from behind her. She turned and saw him kneeling beside the man, who gave a weak moan from his ruined lips. The Iraqi women were still shouting, and the elder woman returned to self-flagellation. Davis passed the pistol, grip out, to Ritter.

  Ritter took the pistol and sprang to his feet. He shouted an Arabic diatribe at the irate women, who jolted as if his words were electric; they fell silent immediately. Rasha’s mouth fell open. Ritter pulled the magazine from the pistol and took the last bullet from the chamber. He tossed the weapon onto the Iraqi’s chest and took a photo of him and the weapon together.

  Ritter used his fingers to open the Iraqi’s eyes. One eyeball was definitely askew compared to the other. “Either Davis hit him hard enough that he’s now cross-eyed, or this is our guy, the other bomb maker from the kidnapping,” Ritter said as he retrieved the pistol.

  “Sir, you’ll want to see this,” Young said from the bedroom. He stepped out, holding an M4 rifle in one hand and a stack of American hundred-dollar bills in the other, sealed with a paper tab. “They were in the cubbyhole. I’ll bet my midtour leave this belongs to Rock Squad. Just have to check the serial number.” He held it out to Ritter, who took the stack of bills instead.

  Ritter gave the bills a quick sniff, then thumbed through the stack. “They’re brand new and in sequential order,” he said.

  “So?” Young asked.

  “It means they came straight from a bank,” Davis said.

  “Good thinking,” Ritter said.

  “Sir, is there some secret squirrel way to track the bills?” Young asked.

  “No, that would be ridiculous,” Ritter deadpanned.

  “Come on, sir. You can tell me.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “If you all are done,” Captain Shelton said from the outer doorway, “we’ve been on this objective for too long.”

  Young and Ritter hooked an arm under the bomb maker’s armpits and dragged him to the door; the women remained silent. Davis locked eyes with the teenager, her face filled with guilt and fear.

  “What about them?” she asked.

  “Leave them,” Ritter said. Rasha and the other Soldier fell in behind the detainee; they didn’t give their backs to the Iraqi women as they left.

  “What did you say to shut them up?” Davis asked.

  Rasha covered her mouth to stifle a giggle as they left.

  “I told them that if they said another word, I’d detain every single one of them. Then no one would bury that body for weeks,” Ritter said.

  “Jesus, I don’t remember you being that cold, sir,” Young said.

  Davis looked to the dead man as they left the compound. The body was in the same place, its crotch now darkened by a lax bladder. She still didn’t know who he was or why his life had ended in his own home. The women clustered in the doorway, tears still flowing as Davis and her fellows took one of their men away for God knew how long. A pang of empathy squeezed her heart. Those women had no one to protect them, no one to provide for them. Half an hour ago their lives had some degree of certainty; now their future was in shambles.

  “What do we do about them?” Davis asked.

  “What can we do?” Ritter said as Sergeant Greely and Nesbitt took the unconscious man by the feet and shoulders and carried him to a waiting MRAP. “Detain them? The tribe will go bat-shit insane if we mess with their women like that. Too much trouble. The other guy had a gun when we shot him, so the kill is legitimate. No payoff for an accidental death from us. They’ll have to make do,” he said.

  “It’s not…” She trailed off.

  “Not what? Fair? Right? This is the war, Cindy. This is the war you don’t get to see from inside the wire.” His tone was patient like a father explaining to a child what had happened to a dead goldfish.

  He grabbed her upper arm and gave it a quick shake. “You did damn good in there. I’m proud of you.”

  She turned away from Ritter, her head low. She felt anything but “good.” “We need to process that detainee, get him in the system,” she said from a world away.

  Ritter and Davis watched the detainee struggle into the Black Hawk helicopter idling on the patrol base’s landing pad. Major Sutherland and Shannon were already on board. Ritter smirked as Sutherland recoiled as the Iraqi prisoner, his face a mass of bandages, was buckled in next to her, as if he carried the plague. Rasha and Jones followed the Iraqi into the helicopter, his face a mess of bandages.

  The crew chief slammed the door shut and tossed a thumbs-up to Ritter, who returned the gesture. Shannon leaned over in her seat and looked at Ritter and Davis. She did nothing but look, which still irked Ritter as poor tradecraft. The crew chief slid the side door shut and climbed into the aircraft, and it pulled into the air moments later. It left a gift of blown dust, which drowned the landing pad in a brown fog.

  Davis coughed and waved at the dust in front of her face. She didn’
t turn to leave; her cheek made a quick spasm as she exhaled slowly.

  “Too bad there wasn’t any room on the bird. Hard to believe that doctor kicked you out of your seat,” Ritter said.

  “She’s a damn Fobbit,” she said.

  “True.” He watched her work a glob of saliva round her mouth, which she spat out. “At least brigade sent that bird to get the detainee to interrogation ASAP. Got rid of two problems. So, your convoy will head back in an hour and—”

  “He was going to kill me, wasn’t he?” she said. Davis’s breathing became rapid as a sudden panic attack overwhelmed her. She started wheezing and gulping for air. Ritter grabbed her by the arm and guided her back to the T-wall barrier.

  “Look at me, Cindy. Your adrenaline is wearing off. This is perfectly normal,” he said. Cindy struggled to speak, but was in the throes of hyperventilating. “Bend over and put your hands on your knees. Count your breaths in your head. That’ll help.”

  She did as instructed. Ritter knelt beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Ritter counted to thirty-seven aloud before her breathing returned to normal. “He had that gun, and he-he-he was going to shoot me,” she said.

  “See, much better,” he said.

  Davis vomited; a tremendous slop of half-digested MRE tuna and breakfast home fries splattered between her feet. Ritter skipped back, but was too slow to avoid all the mess. Davis inhaled and emptied her stomach with another heave.

  “OhGodJesusMaryandJoseph.” She groaned. She coughed a few times and stepped away from her former meals.

  Ritter shook some of the vomit loose from his pants. “Much, much better, right?”

  Davis sank against the T-wall separating the landing zone from the main compound. “Was that normal too?” she spat out.