The Golden Gate, page 17
However, it had always seemed to Roland that blowing up locals offended their sensibilities more than Playboy did. Therefore, Roland’s repeated rebellions against General Order No. 1 had time and time again caused his career prospects to plummet toward the abyss of a Bad Conduct Discharge, then rebound from the Big Chicken Dinner to the mountaintop of consideration for promotion, as though the gods of war had dangled him for eternity from a cosmic bungee cord.
Shepard asked, “Roland, how’s your Farsi today?”
Roland straightened his spine. “But sir, I’m short!”
To be short was a slightly retro term that meant to be mere days from the end of deployment, a status that informally sheltered a soldier from hazardous duty and excused all manner of paranoid or superstitious behavior. In Roland’s case he was not merely twenty-six days short of completing his current deployment and departing the Iraqi Theater of Operations whole, but eight months short of completing the twenty years of service that would entitle him to retire.
Roland’s command of Farsi, nurtured during his previous tours, was useful when fraternizing with Iraqis in violation of General Order No. 1. Less happily for Roland, it also rendered him a slightly more valued cog in the great war machine when a native Iraqi interpreter was unavailable. Unavailable to assist a patrol outside the wire, where legs wound up dangling amid the olive branches of war.
Shepard sighed. “Roland, I’m six days shorter than you are. So today it sucks to be us.”
“How bad does it suck, sir?”
“The spooks say they’ve identified a high-threat target. Battalion has elected us to go pick him or them up before he or they sneak away.”
“Why us?”
“Because we have you. The first two units that were tasked with this plum claimed they didn’t have a ’terp available on short notice.”
Roland winced. If an interpreter was so necessary, the objective probably wasn’t out in the featureless dirt, where you at least had a chance of seeing the shit coming. This objective was in some claustrophobic Iraqi building in a claustrophobic town or village where every goddam doorknob and floorboard could easily be goddam booby-trapped. “Where, sir?”
“Top floor of the Haji Hilton.”
Roland closed his eyes and rolled his head back on his neck. “Jesus.”
The Haji Hilton was a concrete slab-sided landmark of a public housing tenement five stories tall. The building rose from the middle of a dusty single-story village in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. In the days when Saddam Hussein was the Soviet Union’s go-to Middle Eastern sociopath, the Russians had gifted the Hilton to Iraq to demonstrate the majesty of Socialist Civil Engineering. The dump had been erected atop an imperceptible rise in the pancake-flat landscape of central Iraq so that an enormous cistern on its roof could, and in fact did, provide gravity-fed, sun-warmed running water to the building and to the surrounding village.
It was unsurprising that both sides coveted the Hilton, because its top floor was the highest point within a fifty-klick radius. It provided an unobstructed viewpoint from which to observe and report opposing forces’ movements. Particularly forces of Americans, who typically rolled so heavy that movements less resembled a Sioux war party than they resembled the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
However, because the Hilton was such a visible and politically significant icon, the Fobbits had decreed that it be secured by local authority, not by U.S. troops. This was not exactly giving the fox the chicken house keys. But it was exactly throwing rifles and civil affairs manuals in the general direction of a herd of chickens and hoping for the best.
The approach to the Hilton’s top floor therefore provided a perfect place to lay an ambush, or to plant a series of booby traps, for a bunch of hastily summoned, and therefore poorly prepared, Americans.
“How much recon do we have time for, Lieutenant?”
Shepard shook his head. “Battalion says with a tip this hot only the early bird catches the worm.”
Roland said, “Fuck that. Sir. With respect, Battalion can come down here and catch my worm. And so can those NSA fobbits in Baghdad that we’re not supposed to know about.”
Shepard frowned. “I know. But the real time intel from those NSA embeds has been pretty good lately. Besides, Roland, it’s an order, not an invitation to debate.”
* * *
When they rolled up fast and heavy to the Haji Hilton’s entrance with two squads mounted aboard Humvees, the street was deserted. The building looked to be deserted, too, except for a barefoot kid who appeared to be about twelve.
The kid sat outdoors on the building’s front stoop, dressed for the climate in dirty white pajamas. He scratched the belly of a squirming brown dog of indefinite breed that was the size of a satchel charge.
Shepard and Roland dismounted and clattered up to the kid. With their eyes hidden behind ballistic goggles and the rest of their frail humanity muffled beneath the fifty pounds of armor and associated life-and-limb preserving battle rattle upon which Shepard always insisted, they were not dressed for the climate. They were dressed for Halloween on Mars.
The kid had learned, probably by age six, not to threaten the Martians’ personal space by eye contact, and kept scratching the dog.
“Roland, ask him where everybody is.”
The kid answered, head down.
Roland said, “He says they all left because bad men with guns had moved in upstairs and everybody figured we’d come and there would be trouble.”
“Then why’s he still here?”
“Says he couldn’t find his dog ’til now.”
Shepard pressed his lips together, stared into the distance.
The dog was not a favored pet in Middle Eastern cultures, but it had seemed to Roland for some time that the Hajis had figured out that Americans trusted people who were nice to dogs.
At that moment, the K-9 pair dismounted the second Hummer in the little convoy, the handler holding the big German shepherd to heel. The kid’s dog yapped at the giant intruder once, then took off down the street with the kid in pursuit.
Roland turned to his lieutenant. “What do you think, sir? A lookout?”
Shepard shrugged. “I dunno. I do know that if we walk away from this and leave an OP up there that calls mortar fire down on one of our patrols, that blood’ll be on our hands.” He gritted his teeth. “It could all be true. Whether it is or not, our job’s to clear the fifth floor, not to ring the front doorbell and leave a brochure.”
Shepard stepped off toward the building’s front entrance, and the two squads and the K-9 pair piled out and followed without the usual muttered bitching.
Whether due to abundant caution and attention to detail or to sheer luck, the platoons that Ben Shepard had led over the course of his two deployments had never lost a soldier KIA. And not because his units had cowered behind the wire at an FOB in Baghdad. Shepard had always been out here in the suck.
And so his troops called him the Good Shepard and bet their lives every day that he would always find a way to protect his flock.
Still, somebody behind Roland said, “Into the valley of death rode the six fuckin’ hundred.”
Somebody else said, “Shut the fuck up.”
* * *
It took them an hour to clear the building. The Haji Hilton may have had sun-warmed running water in abundance, but like most buildings in Iraq, electricity was an unexpected guest, not a utility.
So they crept up through the pitch black stairwells by the light of helmet-mounted headlamps and rifle mounted lights, like disoriented spelunkers, floor by floor, with the canine sniffing every doorknob and stair tread before a GI touched it.
Finally Roland and Shepard, along with the K-9 pair and the three riflemen not dropped off below to secure the vehicles and the lower floors, burst from the dark hallway into the dim-lit last apartment on the top floor.
The six humans gasped as much from the tension of the journey as from the exertions of climbing under the protective weight of full battle rattle.
Roland surveyed the place as the others poked around cautiously. Like all the corner apartments, it was one room with a sink and bottle-gas stove in one corner and a shared latrine down the hall. Like all the apartment units, regardless of location, that they had cleared on the way up, it was a poorly ventilated pigpen that smelled of cooking and dirty laundry. It had a commanding view, but from a single window at the height of, and no bigger than, a bathroom medicine cabinet’s mirror.
Boy, when the commies had designed a worker’s paradise, they hadn’t fooled around.
What the place lacked was an insurgent, dead or alive, a weapon, or an explosive or other contraband anywhere within view. Or, by the dog’s indifferent attitude, within sniffing range.
A soldier snorted. “Man, some joker sold the spooks a load of crap this time.”
As Roland felt hair begin to rise on his sweat-soaked neck, Shepard said, “Out! Now!”
As he shoved the others toward the door that led to the stairwell he was on his radio screaming the same order to the soldiers on the lower floors.
Boots thundered below them in the stairwell.
Shepard swept up the rear, last man out, breath rasping just behind Roland’s ear.
The initial detonation sounded as distant and harmless as the first thunder peal on a humid July afternoon.
Then the rest of the charges embedded deep within the building’s skeleton ripped it in rapid, choreographed succession.
By the time Roland passed the fourth floor landing, he could feel the stair treads shift beneath his boots, and the roars and howls of a building in its death throes drowned out all other sound.
By the time he reached the third floor landing, the concrete slabs collapsed above and around him. Something glanced off his Kevlar helmet, struck his shoulder like a dropped bowling ball, and drove him to his knees. Roiling dust choked him, and obscured even the helmet lights of those ahead of him as he collapsed. It occurred to Roland that from outside this must be one hell of a show that would become a must-see video on some insurgent website.
* * *
Roland considered himself neither religious nor superstitious, but when he regained consciousness it appeared that he had descended into hell, fulfilling the prophecy that his Aunt Patrice had pronounced when she caught him masturbating at age thirteen.
In darkness licked by flickering orange flames, and stabbed by gyrating lightning bolts, men wept and shrieked and the sour smell of mercaptan sulfur curled in his nostrils.
Roland flexed his fingers, moved his arms, but couldn’t feel his legs. He felt his face, tasted liquid he found there and recognized blood. He realized that he lay on his back, with something blunt poking between his shoulder blades. He lay inclined, with his head higher than his feet, or at least higher than the place where his feet should be.
The light that flickered came from small fires burning among a jumble of concrete slabs, striped by wobbling shadows cast by twisted steel reinforcing bars. The flames were fed by bottled cooking gas that had leaked from apartment stoves, and the sulfur was odorant infused in gas that had leaked, but not yet ignited. The stabbing lights were the headlamp beams of the men who screamed and wept, and the beams jerked back and forth as the men twisted. Though it was impossible to know whether they were trying to free themselves or were simply mad with pain and terror.
Roland realized that the insurgents had deduced that the Americans they had baited would be alert to the usual suspects. IEDs along the route, snipers, booby traps, ambushes. But to date, the insurgents’ concept of asymmetrical warfare had not encompassed bringing down a perfectly good building, thereby blackening their image and rendering hundreds of their countrymen homeless, just to kill fewer Americans than it took to play the Army-Navy game. Back in Fobbitland this cluster fuck would probably be hailed as evidence of the insurgency’s desperation.
Desperate or not, the insurgency had implemented their concept to perfection. The German shepherd, God rest his canine soul, was neither trained nor tasked to sniff for explosives emplaced within the building’s skeleton. Therefore, imploding the Haji Hilton on itself and dropping the Americans and the building’s rubble into the building’s own basement was as simple as erasing an obsolete hotel from the Las Vegas strip.
A headlamp played on Roland’s face and he squinted at it.
“Roland?” The voice was Shepard’s. His headlamp shone above and left of Roland, perhaps ten feet away. “Roland, can you move?”
Roland tried his legs again, felt not pain but the stirrings of panic. “No, sir! Help me!”
Shepard’s voice quivered. “My right arm’s pinned. And my right leg hurts like hell. Hang on.”
As they spoke, Roland realized that only a few of the stabbing headlight beams remained visible at all, and now they simply pointed at unchanging angles, their owners still. And silent. In the relative calm a new sound replaced the screams.
It was a muted roar, as though a mountain stream had crested in spring. Against the skin of his crotch, beneath the nad pad that protected his genitals, Roland felt liquid warmth, as though he had pissed himself.
He swiveled his head so that his own headlamp played across the rubble piled in the building’s basement until he glimpsed a silver flash of motion, and behind the flash a vast, upward-curving shadow. His panic grew. “Lieutenant! The roof cistern. It’s flooding this place!”
As he shouted, he felt the water rise against his body, already at his waist. How much water would it take to fill the interstices remaining between the rubble slabs and debris that filled up the building’s basement? How high would the water rise before its flood ebbed? The irony if he drowned in the middle of the desert was that nobody would even notice the irony. Too many armored vehicles had already turned turtle in canals and streams after sliding off of, or collapsing, rural Iraqi bridges designed for donkey carts.
“Hah!” That he laughed out loud at the thought alerted him to how severely he was in shock.
In shock or not, when Roland played his light on Shepard, he gasped. The lieutenant was pinned upright like a collected butterfly, dangling by his right arm, which stretched away until it disappeared into the shadow where one concrete slab lay atop another. His left arm stretched out in the opposite direction as he strained to reach down and across to Roland. No wonder the lieutenant’s leg hurt. His right leg hung crookedly down and in front of his left, the right tibia protruding through his BDU trousers above the ankle, a white spike dipped in red blood. He looked as though he had been crucified.
Roland gritted his teeth, then played his head lamp toward his own legs. He felt lightheaded even in mere anticipation of the mangled horror that he would see. Mercifully, his legs were obscured beneath the churning water, but it had now risen to his ribs, at the level of the trench knife he wore on the right strap of his web gear and the holstered 9 mm he wore on his left.
He moved his hand to be sure he could draw the Beretta. If while he was trapped here the gas ignited, or the water rose above his chin, he would have only moments to decide whether to burn alive, drown, or use the pistol.
The water lapped Roland’s throat.
He stretched his neck. “Lieutenant!”
Shepard’s light played across him. “Oh Christ. Hang on, Roland. I’ll be there.”
Roland directed his light on Shepard again. The water had barely reached the younger man’s boot soles, its rise seemed to be ebbing infinitesimally, and the stink of sulfur had disappeared. Whatever else Shepard would suffer in his future, he was probably not going to drown like Roland most certainly was about to. Nor would either of them burn alive.
As Roland watched, he saw steel flash as Shepard drew his own trench knife from the scabbard on his web gear with his left hand, then twisted his body to face about. Shepard drew three short, sharp breaths, grimaced, then plunged his knife hand into the dark place where his right hand was imprisoned.
Shepard screamed. Then stabbed again, and screamed again. Then he crumpled to the slab below as his freed right hand emerged from its prison. Shepard cradled his right hand in his left, pressing it to his chest and gasping.
The water reached Roland’s lips, and his neck would stretch no further.
He coughed out water, breathed through his nose and tried to scream.
Then Shepard’s light swept, for an instant, across Roland’s face, inches away, so close that he felt Shepard’s breath on his cheek. Then Shepard ducked his head beneath the still-rising water, surfaced, swearing, grasped Roland by the shoulders with both hands, and dragged him up the inclined slab against which Roland lay. The pain caused by Shepard’s action swept across Roland and his consciousness flickered and died.
* * *
When Roland regained a detached consciousness, he watched through the red fog of emerging pain as Shepard hobbled on his one unbroken leg to the edge of Roland’s concrete slab, held a breath and dove beneath the water’s black surface repeatedly. Once he emerged dragging someone by the legs, but when Shepard finally got whoever it was onto the slab, it was impossible to identify the soldier because his head was gone.
Finally, the lieutenant surfaced with the German shepherd under one arm, heaved it onto the slab that Roland now thought of as his, and dove again.
The dog’s wet black nose was inches from Roland’s, and he felt the animal’s hot breath as it panted. The miracle of the dog’s survival lifted Roland’s spirits so high that he wept for joy. Then the animal coughed blood onto Roland’s face.
Roland’s headlamp reflected off the dog’s pleading, glistening eyes, then Roland directed the light along the animal’s flank until he saw that the dog’s internal organs hung from its gashed belly and puddled in a heap on the concrete.
As Roland’s consciousness again flickered he managed to draw the Beretta, press its muzzle into the pink froth that bubbled from the suffering animal’s whimpering mouth, and squeeze the trigger.
