Into Darkness

by Richard Fox

  “Some of the men said Mukhtar brought them to this side of the river after the attack, then took them south. They were alive when they crossed the river, but no one has seen them since the attack,” she said.

  “Who was with Mukhtar when he brought them across the river?”

  “That animal, Hamsa—he was there. But Mukhtar dropped him off at this house and left with the two Americans. No one else was with him.” Ritter’s mood darkened as he listened to her. O’Neal and Brown might be at the compound to their south, where the armed pickup trucks were hiding. They could be so close, and Ritter had no way to get to them. Even if they had been there at the beginning of this air-assault mission, chances were near certain that Mukhtar would have moved them as soon as possible.

  “What can you tell me about Atif, the Saudi money man?”

  “He never came to see me.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I heard that he likes boys.”

  “Excuse me, sir?” came a voice from the darkness. Ritter turned his light to the doorway; Nesbitt was there. His uniform and skin had the same ethereal tone. He held a small laptop in both hands; a CD and thumb drive in a plastic bag lay on top. “I was in the bathroom and found these hidden under some loose tiles. Do you want to take a look at it?”

  Davis’s first interrogation wasn’t going well. The Arab detainee she’d pulled from the medevac helicopter swore up and down in perfect English that he was a Qatari anthropologist. He elaborated at length on his studies of the Bedouin people, who traded with the Iraqi tribes on the west bank of the Euphrates River, and didn’t hesitate to add that the Sultan of Oman funded his research. He claimed Ritter knew he was a noncombatant and had evacuated him to protect him from any al-Qaeda reprisals.

  Davis didn’t buy his story for a second, but she had no way of figuring out who this guy really was or why Ritter had trussed him up and sent him in. The man sitting across from her could be the Saudi financier, an academic like he claimed, or Osama bin Laden’s barber, for all she knew. She needed Ritter to make sense of all this, but there’d been no word from him since the storm began, a storm that had no sign of letting up.

  Captain Shelton could have shed some light on the detainee if he wasn’t unconscious in the brigade’s emergency room. The brigade surgeon declared he couldn’t treat head trauma at the emergency room and would transfer Shelton to the better-equipped field hospital in the Green Zone. Shelton’s transfer had to wait for the storm to abate, naturally.

  Davis looked over the detainee screening form on the table between her and the detainee and drummed the tip of her pen against the table. The detainee looked at her with disinterest, then turned his attention to teasing dirt out from beneath his fingernails. Even though she was the officer in charge of detainee operations, she had no idea how to conduct an interrogation. Her interrogators, two Soldiers with the army’s basic level of training and a few years of practical experience under their belts, had snuck off to the air force mess hall on the other side of the airport for dinner and were trapped by the sandstorm. She’d deal with them later.

  The army military intelligence center at Fort Huachuca had taught her exactly nothing on what to do in this situation. Her sum total of interrogation knowledge had come from binge-watching a reality cable show about homicide detectives. She could press the detainee on more details, see if his story held up under retelling and scrutiny, but questions were a two-edged sword. The detainee could figure out she didn’t know who he was, and that would only make further interrogations that much more difficult. Sometimes discretion was the better part of valor.

  “OK, Mr. Jaffari. Thank you for the information.” She stood up and signaled to the MP, who should be watching them through the cameras tucked into the ceiling corners.

  “So I’m free to go?” the detainee asked.

  Davis opened her mouth to answer when Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds burst into the room from the door behind the seated detainee. Reynolds grabbed the back of the detainee’s neck and slammed his head onto the table. He pressed the man’s head into the table as he jammed a thick finger into his face. Davis dropped the screening form and pen to the ground; she hadn’t considered detainee abuse as an approach to questioning, primarily because it was illegal.

  “Tell us everything you know, you piece of shit!” Reynolds yelled. He grabbed him by the collar and yanked him upright.

  The detainee sputtered as he pressed the back of his zip-tied hands against his face, checking for blood. “I-I-I need to see a representative from the Red Crescent to report this,” he said.

  “You’ll get nothing and like it. We know you’re the Saudi money man for al-Qaeda.” The detainee’s body language stiffened as Reynolds placed his cards on the table. “You’ll never see the light of day again unless you tell us every detail of your life starting from the minute we zip-tied your sorry ass and working backward.”

  The detainee squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then looked at Reynolds. “You’re using the emotional futility approach? Surprising. I thought you’d use something else first, like ‘establish your identity.’” Davis’s mouth fell open as the detainee quoted from the Army’s interrogation manual.

  Reynolds’s face went beet red with rage as spittle flew from his mouth “You think you know what’s happening here?” He grabbed the table with both hands and flipped it into the air. The edged whiffed past Davis’s face as it flew into the wall.

  “Fear up, harsh. That’s straight from the manual and should only be used after a lengthy period of interrogation. Honestly, is it amateur hour around here tonight?” the detainee said.

  Reynolds growled as he fumbled with the pistol holstered on his thigh. Panic gripped Davis as this situation escalated into something she didn’t know how she’d explain to Colonel Townsend or an investigating officer.

  “Sir, why don’t we talk about this in the hall for a minute?” she said.

  “Good cop/bad cop,” the Saudi said. “Too obvious.”

  Reynolds finally pulled his pistol from the holster and racked the slide back. He grabbed the detainee by the front of his dishdasha and pressed the barrel against his temple.

  “Talk, you miserable bastard, or I will blow your brains out,” Reynolds said.

  Davis wasn’t sure which was harder to believe—Reynolds’s threats or the detainee’s burst of laughter.

  “You forgot to put a clip in the gun,” the Saudi said.

  Reynolds twisted the pistol away from the Saudi’s face and looked into the empty grip. The Saudi laughed even harder as a new threat died on Reynolds’s lips. Reynolds pushed the Saudi away from him hard enough to cause the chair to tip backward onto the rear legs. Davis lunged forward to stop the Saudi from crashing to the floor.

  Before she could reach him, two men in civilian clothes entered the room. One of them grabbed the back of the Saudi’s chair while the other slipped a black hood over his head, which muffled his laughter before it stopped a moment later. One of the civilians grabbed the Saudi by his armpits and hauled him from the room before Davis could ask what was going on. The second man followed them out.

  “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Reynolds demanded as he left the interrogation room. Davis followed him.

  One of the civilians—Davis saw the back of a blond head and his matching khaki vest and pants—practically carried the Saudi to the exit. The other, a whipcord-thin man with a full beard and piercing blue eyes, blocked her and Reynolds from following with an extended palm.

  “That is our detainee! Who the fuck are you to come in here and—” Reynolds shut up as the thin man folded his fingers into his hand but kept his middle finger extended. The middle finger was bent, and the second knuckle still jutted out. Reynolds took another step closer and reached for the offending hand.

  Mike jabbed the knuckle of his middle finger into Reynolds’s throat with a lightning-fast strike. Reynolds’s hands flew to his wounded trachea. The lieutenant colonel bent over as he wheezed and h
acked in attempts to breathe.

  Davis stopped next to Reynolds and put her hands on top of his shoulders. “Sir, you all right?” Reynolds sucked in a breath, which sounded like a whale song. She watched as the two civilians took the Saudi from the building. The skinny man never turned his back on her or Reynolds as he left.

  Reynolds waved to the now open exit door. “Go,” he croaked.

  Davis obeyed, unsure what she was supposed to do when she caught up with the trio. She ran to the end of the hallway and opened the door. She stepped into a maelstrom of wind and sand. She held the crook of her arm against her mouth so she could breathe and held her other hand over her eyes. She peered through the gaps between her fingers and saw a pair of red taillights receding into the storm. A moment later, they were gone.

  This was the second time one of her detainees had vanished. Someone knew what was really going on, and she bet that person was Eric Ritter. If he made it back in one piece, he had some explaining to do.

  There was a small office on the second floor of their refuge. The drawers of an old writing desk were empty, but a well-worn calculator and several pens with gnawed-on end caps littered the desktop. The Saudi’s former office gave Ritter enough quiet and privacy to examine what little intelligence this mission had found.

  Ritter clicked through the umpteenth IED attack video. The DVD Nesbitt found was the only thing Ritter could fully access. The thumb drive and most of the computer files on the laptop were encrypted with a flame-out protocol; too many failed attempts at a password, and the hard drive would corrupt and destroy its data. The only thing on the laptop he could read was a spreadsheet ledger. He recognized a few names from the thumb drive Kovalenko had brought him back from Victory. He was sure the Saudi was the accountant responsible for both ledgers, a hypothesis he’d put to the test if Shannon let him lead the interrogation.

  The DVD skipped to the next video, which showed a hard-top road that could be anywhere in Iraq. A Humvee sped past the camera, heat shimmer roiling in its wake. A three-week-old date in the lower-left corner was the first clue from the video.

  “Get ready,” a voice hissed.

  A Humvee crossed into view a moment before the road exploded in a cloud of gray dust and black smoke. A chorus of voices shouted, “Allah akbar” (God is great) as the explosion tossed the Humvee onto its side. The gunner hung from the turret like a rag doll. The video swayed from side to side as the camera was carried away.

  Ritter paused the video and checked the date on the screen with the dates in the encoded ledger. He found a match with a payment made to “37.” He filtered the spreadsheet to show only 37’s payments and found almost two dozen attacks with associated dates. This correlation was a decent bread crumb; a bit of database digging would tell him where 37 operated and whether any of those attacks had intelligence reports identifying the IED cell responsible. Then the videos and the ledger would be enough to go after 37.

  There was one more attack on the ledger, but instead of a payout, the cell read, “No pay due.” The gratis attack was dated ten days ago. Odd, Ritter thought.

  The next, and final, video on the DVD was ten days old.

  “Apropos,” Ritter mumbled.

  The camera angle on the video was elevated, focused on two Humvees stopped close to each other on an asphalt road. A gray apron of sand and rocks extended from the road to dilapidated brick buildings. A lone Humvee pulled up to the pair.

  “Look at that! What a gift. Praise be to Allah,” said a voice on the video.

  “Patience, habibi. Wait until the crusader opens the door,” a second voice said. Ritter stopped the video. Did he know that voice from somewhere? He shook his head to clear the tendrils of exhaustion playing in his mind. He replayed the last thirty seconds, paying closer attention to the voices.

  On the video the rear passenger door of the newly arrived Humvee opened, and a Soldier got out. The blood drained from Ritter’s face as realization hit him. That Soldier in the video was him.

  “Now! Do it now!” the second voice said. Something plastic clattered to the floor next to camera. “Theeb, you worthless bastard! Give that to me!” the second voice said.

  Ritter watched himself and Lieutenant Park move toward the brick buildings. He watched the explosion play out. Watched as he struggled to pull Jennifer Mattingly from the burning Humvee. A jagged spear of survivor’s guilt lodged in his heart as she died in front of him for a second time.

  The screen lurched away from the explosion and passed over several men as they made for an open doorway. The screen titled up, and a familiar face flashed across the screen.

  “No…,” he said.

  “Turn that off,” said the second voice. Ritter paused the video, then went back frame by frame. He knew that face. He knew that voice. It was Abu Ahmet.

  Rage simmered in Ritter’s heart. Abu Ahmet, his newfound ally, had killed Jennifer and two other Soldiers on that long, terrible day. He could fulfill his vow to Joe and bring Jennifer’s killer to justice. It would be all too easy to call Abu Ahmet in to the patrol base and detain him; let Abu Ahmet rot in prison for the rest of his miserable life.

  “Not yet,” Ritter mumbled. Abu Ahmet, despite his crimes, was still useful and needed. If Ritter captured him or simply shot him in the heart the next time they saw each other, it would destroy the relationship with the Qarghuli tribe. The search for the missing Soldiers would go back to square one and probably get even harder if the locals turned on them again.

  Ritter popped the DVD from the laptop and slowly turned it in the screen’s pale glare. This knowledge wasn’t power; it was a burden. The idea of maintaining a facade with Abu Ahmet turned Ritter’s stomach, but there were no better options. Abu Ahmet was a dead man, but Ritter could choose the time and place of the reckoning—after they found their missing Soldiers, after he found Mukhtar.

  He snapped the DVD in half, then in half again. Others in the American military wouldn’t share Ritter’s conclusions. If Shelton knew, he’d arrest Abu Ahmet in a heartbeat without remorse or regret.

  I used to be like him, Ritter thought. A thought flickered in the back of his mind. What if he did what the Army deemed to be the right and honorable thing? He could turn his back on Shannon and the Caliban Program forever. The thought danced for another moment before succumbing to the darkness in his soul. He wasn’t that kind of person anymore. He would balance the scales between him and Abu Ahmet, and only the Caliban Program gave him the power to do that.

  A muffled thump pressed against the walls of his room. If there wasn’t a storm and sand blasting everything from here to Baghdad, he would have guessed the thump was a mortar impact. Ritter powered off the laptop and pulled his armor back on. This day was just full of surprises.

  Thomas and Nesbitt sat at the base of the stairwell leading to the second floor. The lieutenant had decided to keep everyone on the second floor during the storm. He wanted a guard on the only unbarred entrance to the house, and Sergeant First Class Young had set up a hasty guard schedule.

  Nesbitt checked his watch; it had been twenty minutes since the thump. He almost told Kovalenko and Young about how he’d booby-trapped the suicide belt but chickened out at the last minute. If someone had set the belt off, then he or she was dead, and Nesbitt didn’t have a problem. If it wasn’t the belt and he admitted to something the lawyers might label as a war crime, then he’d definitely have a problem.

  “I think it was a sandworm,” Thomas said.

  “What?”

  “That thump. It was a sandworm from that Dune book. They live in the deep deserts, and that’s all we’ve got out here,” Thomas said.

  “I saw the movie, and you keep talking like that, and Sergeant Young will give you a piss test for acting crazy.”

  “It ain’t crazy. This is just like Arrakis. We’ve got Fremen and Harkonnens. Hell, even that Captain Ritter is like Muad’Dib with him speaking Arabic and carrying that knife around.” Thomas leaned forward from where he sat on the st
airs. His armor sagged downward, releasing a hot air pocket, which had turned the inside of his vest into an oven.

  “I have got to get you laid when we get back. Besides…” Nesbitt debated making his next point. Messing his pants had caused plenty of harassment, and any display of nerd knowledge could make his life worse. “Besides, who are we in this situation? The Fremen or the Harkonnens? The movie didn’t end well for one side.”

  Thomas didn’t answer as the storm rattled the front door on its hinges.

  “Damn it, Nesbitt. Why do you have to go and ruin things by thinking about them?”

  A blue light lit up the stairwell. “Two coming down,” said Specialist Porter as he tromped down the stairs, his aide bag in hand. Ritter was a step behind him. Porter sat between the two guards and looked at Thomas.

  “I heard you took a round. Crack open your vest so I can see where you got hit,” Porter said.

  Thomas shrugged. “I’m just fine, Doc. The armor worked as advertised.” He opened the Velcro side patches to his armor, then exposed his fish-belly-white abdomen. Porter turned on a flashlight and gently pressed against Thomas’s stomach. There were no visible bruises, and Thomas didn’t react to any of Porter’s pokes.

  “Doesn’t look like you have any internal bleeding. How’re you feeling?”

  “You mean, how do I feel after getting shot, almost blown up by some terrorist asswipe, then getting lost in the middle of a sandstorm? I’ve had better days,” Thomas said.

  “Any slurred speech, vomiting? Blood in your stool?”

  “No, and the only shit I’ve seen is—”

  “You shut the hell up,” Nesbitt said.

  Ritter cleared his throat.

  “You two go back upstairs. Greely found a stash of those ketchup-flavored potato chips and that nasty Iraqi soda. Go get some chow,” Porter said.

  Thomas contorted himself to reset his uniform and armor. “Hey, sir, thanks for shooting that guy. I would’ve done it, but that woman was there with her kids and all…”