Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

He shook his head. “You’re going to Baghdad. Your flight leaves in four hours. You have a new mission. It’s all yours. You’re running it.”

“Which is?”

“This is from Bill Walden himself. Bring us the heads of Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir. Al-Qaeda’s on the verge of taking over all of Anbar Province in Iraq. The country’s about to explode into civil war. Our troops are caught in the middle. It’ll be a bloodbath. The Defense Intelligence guys’ve got casualty estimates you wouldn’t believe. The only way to stop it is to stop those two.”

“Why me?”

“I understand. This is big. But you found him. You have a better feel for him than any of us. You speak Arabic like a native. Who better? You were born for this, Carrie.”

“And maybe a little justice for Dima. And Rana,” she murmured.

“Ah, Carrie,” he sighed. “Don’t look for justice in this life. You’ll be a whole lot less disappointed.”

“The targets. How do you want ’em? Dead or alive?” she asked.

“In a million pieces for all I care. Just get the bastards,” Saul said through gritted teeth.

She and Virgilwere in a taxi heading down Rue Ouzai toward the airport. The road was crowded and noisy, even this late at night. The buildings near the coast were old and cracked, with washing and black banners with white lettering proclaiming, “Death to Israel,” hanging from their balconies.

She’d gone back to Virgil’s place to pack. When she started to fold her Terani dress, Virgil just shook his head.

“Won’t have much use for that in Baghdad,” he said.

“Probably not,” she said, folding it and putting it in the suitcase, not knowing what else to do with it.

When they were ready, they headed for the cemetery near Boulevard Bayhoum so she could leave a message in the dead drop letting Julia/Fatima know she had to leave again. She told her to stay safe. She didn’t have to mention what they both knew: that the bombs were coming.

“What about Julia’s warning about Hezbollah and the Israelis?” she’d asked Saul when they were still at the safe house apartment. “She’s been solid gold. There’s a war coming. It’s only a matter of weeks or months.”

“We’ve kicked it upstairs. It was in the President’s Daily Brief. Estes made sure the president saw it,” Saul said.

“Are they warning the Israelis?”

Saul raised his hands in a gesture that somehow inexplicably encompassed two thousand years of Jewish history. “That’s up to the administration. Sharing with other countries isn’t intelligence, it’s politics,” he said.

“Even allies?” she asked.

“Especially allies.”

“If it happens, Lebanon will get the worst of it,” she said, pouring the last of the Belvedere into glasses for the three of them.

“Always. L’chaim ,” he said, raising his glass.

“Up yours,” Virgil said, and drank.

Looking out the window, she saw the outline of a palm tree silhouetted against the ugly slum buildings in the headlights of passing traffic and she felt something tug at her.

“I’m going to miss Beirut,” she said to Virgil. There was something about this life, these people. A kind of gallant madness. What was it Marielle had said? That they lived on “a bridge over an abyss.”

“It’s not Virginia,” he nodded. A road sign indicated the airport was up ahead.

Her cell phone rang. It was Saul.

“Carrie?” he said.

“We’re almost at the airport,” she responded.

“Fielding’s dead.”

She felt a sudden vacuum, a hole open in the pit of her stomach. She’d hated him, but still. Unable to stop herself, she thought about her father, feeling sick at the memory of finding him the day before Thanksgiving, seeing what he had done to himself and rushing him to the hospital in an ambulance, thinking I’m sorry, Dad, so sorry, and in a horrible awful way, wishing she hadn’t come home early at the same time.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Gunshot to the head. Looks like suicide.”

Virgil glanced over at her, wondering what was happening, then straight ahead, squinting against the headlights from oncoming cars.

“We’re coming back,” she said. “We need to get to the bottom of this.”

“Carrie, he wasn’t stupid. He knew what was coming.”

“Saul, listen to me. He was a lying piece of shit, a pathetic excuse for a human being, but he wouldn’t do this. Not this. He wasn’t the type.”

“What type do you think he was?”

“The kind who thought he was smarter than anybody. That no one could touch him. He would always come out on top.” She tapped Virgil’s arm. “Listen, just wait for me. We’re coming back.”

“Don’t. That’s an order. Iraq’s too important. Besides, whatever caused this, the answers are in Baghdad,” he said.

Route Irish, Baghdad, Iraq

Demon was talking under the metal arches in the waiting area at Baghdad International Airport. A stocky ex-military type with an Alfred E. Neuman gap between his front teeth, he was dressed in desert BDUs with a pirate skull and crossbones painted on his armored vest and the word “Demon” on his military helmet. He wore no shirt under the vest and his gym-built arms and neck were covered with cobra and devil-face tattoos. Like the other members of their Blackwater company escort team, he wore an ammo belt with extra magazines and a pair of hand grenades hanging like deadly fruit across his chest, an M4 carbine cradled in the crook of his arm.

Although it was before nine in the morning, Carrie was already sweating. The temperature was over ninety degrees on this early April day and it felt like it was going to get a lot hotter. Like the others, she was wearing an armor vest and Kevlar helmet and awkwardly carried a Blackwater-issued M4, a weapon she had never touched before. Virgil, next to her, looking equally uncomfortable, wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve.

It had been seven months since she had been in Iraq, but the heat, the private military companies, the sense of war the minute you flew in brought it all back almost as if she had never left, as if Beirut had never happened. Hard to believe it had been less than two months since it had all started with Nightingale’s attempt to kidnap her in Beirut. The ninth of April now. Back in the States, spring break, April Fool’s, tax season and the end of March Madness. As if she were on a run, where time seemed both compressed and endless simultaneously. Back in Iraq now, she thought grimly. Only this time she had a lead.

During the layover in Amman, she’d gone to the ladies’ room in the airport, where a female agent from Amman Station, an attractive young Arab-American woman, had slipped her an encrypted cell phone under the stall partition and she’d used it to call Saul.

“What about the thing I gave you?” she’d asked him. Nightingale’s cell phone.

“Still working on it. After every time he met Rana, he called the same cell number in Iraq.”

“Where?”

“All over. Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi. Last one was Ramadi.”

“So do we think that’s where Abu you-know-who is?” she whispered into the phone.

“Ubaida? Yes. Carrie?”

“I’m here.”

“Watch yourself. You’re in the red zone.” Things must really be bad if he thought he had to warn her, she thought. From the news on TV she knew the war, which had been bad when she had left Iraq, was amping up. Or was he warning her about something else? Like a major escalation or AQI op?

“Saul, is something coming?”

“It usually is,” he said.

Demon was briefing them on what to expect on the drive into Baghdad’s Green Zone from the airport. They stood with a group of contractors for Blackwater and other security companies and a pair of CNN reporters who’d just flown in with them from Amman.