The 56th Man

by J. Clayton Rogers

  Ari let go. Sandra dropped to the pavement.

  SIXTEEN

  They were not fifty yards beyond the wire when there was a loud metallic rap on the side of the Bradley. The men on the benches jerked. They knew the sound all too well.

  The private seated next to Ghaith had not even properly settled in. Like all the other members of the squad, he had been uneasy around the translator ever since the day he had publicly removed his balaclava after chasing down the IP impersonators and gone postal in the middle of one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the entire country. If they had been a little nervous around him when his face was hidden, they were practically crossed-eyed with the willies now that the mask was off. While Ghaith was no Hunchback of Notre Dame, an unhooded collaborator stood out like a four star general in any AO. It was like having some guy wearing a 'shoot me' Post-it on his back in a ballroom filled with homicidal maniacs, and anyone standing near him was bound to become the collateral catch of the day. The private next to Ghaith in the fighting vehicle did not want to be rubbing thighs with Bad Ass Luck in the flesh, and was trying to put some air between him and the translator when the first bullet struck.

  While the insurgents occasionally heaved a mortar shell or 122-mm rocket inside the fort, no one expected an ambush this close to the FOB, where the Americans could call in fire support and reinforcements within seconds.

  But when the men in the Bradley heard a second ping, then a whole string of them, and then someone outside shouting, "RPG!", they knew this movie was real.

  Sometimes the Bradley imparted a sense of security. At other times it seemed nothing better than a trap in which every man inside would be roasted. It was ideal while bullets were flying, but rocket propelled grenades were another matter.

  A rattle like a train on broken ties shook the vehicle. Staff Sergeant Henley was blasting away with the coax. The firing stopped when he and Captain Rodriguez ducked down in the turret. A nearby explosion threw the men on one bench forward into the laps of the men across from them. Ghaith pushed a frightened soldier back into his seat.

  The Bradley halted. The driver was smacking his headset. He had lost contact with Rodriguez. It was SOP for the driver to stop when the intercom link was broken. Rodriguez squeezed around to talk to the driver, probably to order him to continue forward. Then he saw the Humvee in front of them burning and swore. He alerted brigade TOC.

  "Contact left! AK’s, PKM’s, RPG’s! We are engaging!”

  Whoosh…!

  “Contact right! Staff Sergeant, get back on that coax!"

  The Bradley again shuddered under the hammering of the M240C. The counterpoint of bullets hitting the vehicle's armor slackened but did not stop entirely.

  The captain leaned down and yelled. The men on the benches couldn’t hear him, but the driver did. He twisted around in his seat and shouted, “Gitfo!”

  As soon as the ramp dropped the two men at the back got the fuck out. Taking advantage of the coaxial's curtain of fire, they ran to the wrecked Humvee behind them to check for survivors. Ghaith could see that the Bradley was neatly boxed in, with Humvees on fire forward and back.

  There was a pause, then two more men dashed out, including the private so adverse to rubbing shoulders with Ghaith, who silently wished him luck. A dat-dat-dat of automatic gunfire sent the private scurrying out of sight.

  As Ghaith took his turn down the ramp he spotted two dead men near an alley entrance. Although their heads had been swathed in kuffiah scarves, Ghaith noted a red beret peaking out of one of them.

  Bastards….

  There were two more explosions, very close. Heads appeared on rooftops and it sounded like two dozen Russian-made automatic rifles going off all at once. The man who had emerged with Ghaith screamed and fell. Ghaith used the man's vest as a handhold and hauled him towards an open door, where a soldier ('Four Fingers of Death’ Ropp, of all people) was beckoning him. Ghaith stumbled and the wounded man went down. From the look of his leg wound, he deserved to howl. Then Ropp was next to them. He slung the man's carbine over his shoulder, and together they managed to drag-and-carry the man to the building.

  Sergeant Mastin came pounding downstairs, two men behind him. Seeing the wounded man, he came over and gave him a cursory inspection.

  "Put some pressure on that wound, soldier," he told Ropp. He gave the wounded man a pat on the shoulder. "You got some first class buddy aide. Hooa."

  "Hooa," the wounded man gasped.

  While Mastin keyed his hand mike, another soldier crouched next to Ropp to fill him in.

  "The house is clear. There's no sign of a bomb."

  Ghaith understood this to mean the house had not been booby-trapped to explode when enough Americans seeking cover came through the door. A rather neat trick, in his opinion, although he would not have been so appreciative had the room blown up under his feet.

  Pressing down on the injured soldier's wound, Ropp said, "The Fedayeen aren’t going to blow the place up if they're standing on the roof."

  "Yeah..."

  "What the fuck are they doing, hitting us so close to the wire?"

  "Making a point, I guess."

  "What point?"

  "That they can hit us this close to the wire, what d'ya think?"

  Ghaith thought there was more to it than that.

  He knew he was taking a risk when he took up the wounded man's M-4. The soldiers were fully aware that more than one Iraqi working for the invaders had suddenly turned a gun on his American employers. Seeing him pick up a loose carbine in the middle of a firefight might prompt Mastin to shoot him on the spot, no questions asked. So Ghaith went for his only refuge: the street.

  He paused at the door. He noted an odd, orange splash of color on the reactive armor of the Bradley he had left only the minute before. New and bright, it was no military emblem. More like the kind of splatter left behind when someone threw a balloon filled with paint.

  The Bradley had been marked out.

  Captain Rodriguez had never seen a stand-up fight like this outside of maneuvers at Fort Hood. He had heard of soldiers going toe-to-toe with the enemy in 2003, but since then the foe had switched to less costly tactics. Rodriguez had dealt mainly with IED’s and the occasional sniper. Chasing down a hot Q36 radar hit might result in a brief firefight with a carful of insurgents, but otherwise he spent his days trying to bond with the natives and cleaning up after car bombs. This was a whole new level. This was just…great. The enemy had come out into the open, in spades. He had spotted at least two dozen men shooting down at them from the rooftops, and from the intensity of the fire he suspected a lot more. But he could not be cheerful. The Humvees blocking his path had reported half a dozen wounded.

  Staff Sergeant Henley behaved as though he did not have a care in the world. In between bursts from the coax, he bellowed, “I love being attached to III Corps, sir!”

  Rodriguez gave him a skeptical look and tried not to laugh. Then he pressed his hand beneath his CVC helmet and swore. “We’ve got friendlies coming up the road from the fort.”

  During the next few minutes he was totally preoccupied with the net, contacting his platoon leaders and the S-3, as well has calling up the 9 Line for a medevac. It took him a while to realize that, while the enemy fire had intensified, none of it was directed at the Bradley.

  Henley noticed this, too. “Something screwy’s going on, sir. Oh shit—“

  An Iraqi policeman had dashed across the street and up the ramp of the Bradley.

  “Suicide bomber!”

  Rodriguez swore at the Bradley driver, who couldn’t hear him because of the broken comm link. Ducking inside, he confronted the wide-eyed policeman and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw he was not strapped with explosives. The policeman began talking rapidly to the captain, who nodded and tried to recall his social protocol. Should he kiss the Iraqi for not being a terrorist? He turned to the driver.

  “Why is that ramp open?”

  “I thought we shou
ld provide cover—“

  “Forget it,” Rodriguez said. The Iraqi cop was giving him a headache with all his frantic gesturing. “Where’s Haji?”

  “The interpreter, sir?” The driver grunted as he turned around in his seat and peered at the empty benches. “I guess he’s gone Elvis, sir.”

  “Captain Rodriguez!” Henley called down from the turret. “I think you should come see this, sir!”

  Rodriguez told the driver to keep an eye on the Iraqi cop, then squeezed back into the turret.

  “Take a look over there.” Henley pointed to the right of the Humvee burning behind them. “I think we’ve got a red-on-red situation.”

  Red-on-red was the tactical version of divide and conquer. Whenever Coalition troops encountered opposing factions of Iraqis engaged in a firefight between themselves, they tried to turn it to their advantage. Often this meant just sitting back and watching Iraqis kill each other. If it was Sunnis against Shias, they would join in on whichever side Washington favored that month. And the Americans would jump in on the side of anybody who was beating up on al-Qaeda.

  But what Rodriguez saw now looked more like a grand-scale assassination attempt than a typical red-on-red fracas. Their Iraqi translator was skittering back and forth on the street, using every crumb of cover while the entire weight of the ambush exploded around him. He would fire a round at a window or rooftop, duck for a moment as he timed his next move, then pop behind a cement mixer or half-filled HESCO cell left over from construction of the fort. Rodriguez fumed at the way soldiers scrambled to get out of his path whenever they saw him coming their way. They had quickly comprehended that they were not the main target. Not this time, at least. He was only mildly relieved when he heard a scream and turned to see an enemy combatant being blown out a window. Blue Platoon was working its way through the buildings from behind and forcing a mass eviction. Henley had seen this, too, and laughed.

  “They got the fobbits in action!”

  The translator stood and aimed the carbine at another bobbing head. There was no puff of smoke. He was out of ammo. But a moment later he jumped up and pretended to squeeze off another round.

  “Man, is that whistling in the dark or what?” said Henley.

  “Staff Sergeant, why aren’t you firing your weapon?”

  “The Apaches are coming, sir. I can hear them.”

  “So?”

  “Yes, sir!” And Henley resumed firing the coax.

  Rodriguez would have run out himself to help the translator, but Henley was right. The Apaches were coming, and he wanted Blue out of the upper stories so that it would not get hit by any 30-mm rounds that might pierce the roofs. But as he concentrated on the net, he spotted a private—was it Ropp?—making a mad dash across the road towards the translator’s latest position. He seemed to be carrying spare ammunition clips.

  Silence fell over the block when the attack helicopters were finished. Rodriguez started taking the Green 2 and found that as bad as things had seemed, they could have been a lot worse. He had twelve men wounded, one seriously, and two dead Humvees, but that was it. Even the interpreter had survived.

  When he had a moment to spare he walked over to Ghaith, who was seated next to Ropp. They were sharing laughs and unheated all-beef franks. Ropp stood and saluted.

  “At ease.” He smiled at the soldier and the civilian. “That was a helluva show you two put on.”

  “We aim to please, sir,” Ropp beamed.

  “Yes…” The captain turned to Ghaith. “And you, Haji, are one helluva lucky man. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought this attack was staged just for your benefit. But there must be over a dozen dead Fedayeen lying around here. No man is worth that kind of price.”

  Ghaith smiled politely.

  “You mind telling me who you really are?” Rodriguez asked. “You’re under no obligation to tell me, of course. I can only assume you’ve already been vetted, since battalion sent you down to me. But to be quite honest, once you were out in the open, every gun was trained on you.”

  “Perhaps that was because I was out in the open,” Ghaith reasoned.

  “Captain Rodriguez!” Staff Sergeant Henley had clambered down the Bradley and was frowning at the orange splotch on the side of the vehicle. “We got some bodacious bird shit here, sir!”

  The captain stared at the mark. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Captain!” a soldier on a nearby rooftop called down. “These camelwonks are wearing red berets under their head blankets, sir! I think—“

  “Roger that!” the captain shouted, growing angrier by the second. With wrathful amazement he turned on Ghaith. “Do you know who those men are?”

  “Why…” Ghaith smiled at the captain, then at Ropp, who had backed away from the captain to finish off his last hot dog. Ropp looked surprised, and shrugged.

  “Insurgents, right?”

  “I think Haji here knows better,” said Rodriguez.

  “I believe this is a cadre from the Wolf Brigade, Captain Rodriguez,” Ghaith sighed.

  “That doesn’t surprise you?”

  “It’s not surprising that men under the command of Abu Walid, a good Shiite general, would be shooting at an alleged Sunni collaborating with the Americans. No, not at all.”

  “So, you’re Sunni.”

  “I was a clerk under a Sunni administrator,” Ghaith responded. “That’s all.”

  “Never seen a clerk with balls like that!” Ropp barked. He winced, and added, “Sir.”

  “Neither have I, private.” The captain’s eyes narrowed. “The Wolf Brigade. That’s the Iraqi unit that fought alongside us at Mosul. These are our allies. Yet they marked my Bradley just to get at you. Don’t deny it—it’s plain as the nose on your face.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about them,” said Ghaith. “You can always find more assassins.”

  “What?”

  “The Wolf Brigade. You use them to assassinate undesirables. They allow the Americans to keep their hands clean.”

  “What the fuck…I mean, sir, is that true?”

  Rodriguez threw an irritated glance at Ropp, then came up toe-to-toe with Ghaith. “My friend, I think you need a little R&R in the Green Zone.”

  Only a few miles from the Baskin-Robbins, Ari saw the entrance to a park and turned in. There was nobody else there, which was not surprising. On one side was a sterile-looking chain link fence that separated the park from Powhite Parkway, on the other a threadbare patch of woods through which Ari could see the back of a $1.99 laundry. Half of the clearing was taken up by the lane and parking lot. There were no amenities, there was no playground, and the two rotting benches looked unwholesomely fragile. With nowhere to jog or commune with nature, it was an ideal dumping ground for dispirited souls.

  He did not get out of the xB. He sat and allowed his tears to wash out quickly and efficiently. When that was done, he sent a mental fireman to investigate the gutted remnant of Ari Ciminon, extinguishing glowing embers with morbid ease, until all that was left was a dark and murky cavern.

  But the ache would not leave. Perhaps he could have dismissed it, as he had done his rage and remorse. Yet he was familiar with the pain. It was, in fact, his only companion. And now that he had damned himself with his actions, it might be the only friend he would ever have.

  While driving away from the ice cream parlor, he had seen customers old and young watching him in horror. At least one of them held a cell phone to her ear. And the wary young girl behind the counter would have already called the police. But the police were the least of his concerns. It was the U.S. Marshal who would come after him, pinpointing him with the LoJack and storming his little Scion with vengeful precision. He would not try to avoid arrest and repatriation--and certain death. But what would happen to his wife and son? Would their new adoptive land evict them? Would they be hustled off on the first plane to Baghdad? It was horrifyingly possible that he had condemned them, too.

  And the Riggins family? They would go unavenged. T
here seemed no great urgency to solve the crime, in any event. Their deaths were a statistical nullity compared to the murder rate in his own country. Now Ari's sense of mission, adopted out of boredom as much as through any desire for justice, would result in the death of his own line. This had been the fate of all too many of his countrymen who had stood up to Saddam. Entire families wiped out. The Americans insisted such things did not happen in their land of plenty. Or if they did, it was due to unsavory foreigners on their soil, or through some bizarre concatenation of unlikely events resulting from aberrant behavior.

  What jokers.

  It was true that Ari felt safer here, that it was highly unlikely that a car parked next to him would explode or that someone would approach him in friendly greeting before yanking the cord on a suicide vest. But he sensed an underlying fear in this society. Like when he was a kid, and Omar aimed a rubber band at his face. The dread of being shot was almost as bad as being shot. Americans went in constant fear of that stretched and poised rubber band.

  Of course, if he had a choice of fears, he would choose the place where that rubber band was least likely to be released. America was probably a good place to raise a family. A good place to survive in. After all, that was why he was here.

  Then why did he take out after Sandra that way? Even before he had attacked her, he had egged her on with criticisms and false comparisons. Was it because she represented so much that was smug and intellectually vacuous? She had crossed the line when she spoke of his wife that way. But was it his fault that she had gone too far?

  Rana. With her he had balanced his fortunes, discussed options, shared risks. Ari had enough ambition for a dozen men, so there was no need for his wife to play Lady Macbeth. But he missed the dance of her eyes whenever he made a veiled reference to a course of action or a momentous decision. They could not speak openly, of course. There was the risk that even his house was bugged. A top-level general and his mistress had been tortured and executed, and the general's entire family eliminated, when his pillow-talk strayed to Saddam Hussein's bastard origins. Yet it was astonishing how much Ari and Rana could convey without words, and how little was misunderstood.