Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“Listen up. I’m only gonna say this once and I don’t give a shit if you listen because you may not be alive long enough for it to matter,” Demon said in a way that let Carrie understand he’d given this speech plenty of times before. “It’s only six miles from here to the Green Zone. It’s a flat, mostly straight route on the Airport Road, a.k.a. ‘Route Irish’ for you newbies, a.k.a. ‘RPG Alley’ for those of you who are actually paying attention. We’ll be there in ten minutes. No big deal, right?” He grinned, showing the gap in his teeth.

“We’ll be in two convoys of five vehicles each. Each will have three armored Chevy Suburbans and an armored Blackwater Mamba truck with an M240 machine gun on the roof in the lead and another Mamba to bring up the rear. Now, some of you new people,” he said, looking around at them, “may be thinking this is all a bit of overkill. Some of you may look at our big fat-ass American vehicles and feel a little safer with all that steel plate welded on them. Trust me, with the amount of RDX explosive our little jihadi brothers use, the armor around you is about as effective as tissue paper.

“Each of you will be assigned a field of vision to watch as we go. Keep your eyes open. Do not fire your weapon unless I yell ‘Fire!’ I mean it. If I do tell you to shoot, you better do it or I’ll shoot you myself. Now, at this point, some smartass might be saying to himself, ‘This is bullshit, Jack.’

“Okay, bullshit. But just for the record, yesterday there were twenty-one attacks on American convoys on this same road. We had two fatalities. But today, you lucky people, is the day before the big Mawlid al-Nabi holiday. The birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. So we can expect the ragheads to up the ante. By the way, it’s the Sunni holiday, so in addition to attacks on us, we can expect explosions and car bombs at Sunni mosques and markets. Five days from now is the Shiite version of Mawlid al-Nabi and we get to do the whole damn thing all over again. Briefing’s over. We’ll either get through or we won’t. Any questions?”

He looked at them. A couple of the contractors shuffled their feet, but no one said anything.

“Okay, boys and girl”-he nodded to Carrie, the only woman-“get ready for the longest ten minutes of your life. Let’s get the hell outta here,” he said, and turned and walked away. After a moment, they followed him outside the terminal. The gray Mambas and black SUVs were lined up at the curb in the blazing sun.

Rabbit, an ex-marine with cropped peach-fuzz hair, told Carrie and Virgil which SUV to get into and where to sit and gave them their field-of-fire assignments. They were in the second convoy. Carrie’s seat was in the middle row, right side.

“What are we looking for?” she asked Rabbit. She’d done this before, last time she had been here, but from everything around her, it was clear things had changed.

“Any vehicle that doesn’t stay the hell away from us. Anything. Women, kids, a pile of garbage where it shouldn’t be,” he said. “If anyone comes close, yell ‘ imshi .’ It means-”

“I know what it means,” she snapped.

“I’ll bet you do.” He nodded.

She checked her M4. It was loaded with a standard thirty-round magazine. The safety selector lever on the left side was on “Safe.” She brushed a fly off her face and hoped to God she wouldn’t have to use it.

Waiting at Beirut airport and on the flight to Amman and the second flight to Baghdad, Virgil next to her reading a paperback, she’d mostly listened to John Coltrane on her iPod, cool romantic tracks like “Body and Soul,” and thought about Fielding’s suicide. The question was why. It couldn’t have been because of what was waiting for him at Langley. Fielding was the kind of asshole who had always gotten away with things his whole life. He would’ve figured he’d find a way out of this too. So why had he done it? What was he hiding? And what did it have to do with Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir?

The SUV and the Mambas were loaded up and waiting. Rabbit was sitting in front of her in the “shotgun” passenger seat. Although the air-conditioning was on, the SUV was hot with the windows partially rolled down, their weapons poking out. The radio crackled. She heard Demon’s voice say, “Keep your eyes open and your sphincters tight. Let’s roll.”

The lead Mamba started to move forward and their SUV followed right behind it, the Mamba’s Blackwater company flag, black with a white bear’s paw, flying from the open roof-hatch cover. The convoy circled on the access road and headed for the airport gate. Carrie could see it up ahead through the windshield. The gate was heavily sandbagged, with concrete barriers that forced vehicles to make sharp back-and-forth turns before they could enter the airport. It was operated by Blackwater guards in full body armor manning machine guns.

A sign next to the gate read, “Leaving Airport Zone. Condition Red.” Virgil leaned over and whispered in her ear that “Condition Red” meant weapons ready to fire. As they approached the barrier arm across the road, Demon’s voice crackled over the radio:

“Lock and load, people. Safeties off. No tourists on this bus.”

There was a sound of clacking as everyone racked the charging handles on their weapons. Carrie moved the lever from “Safe” to “Semi” instead of “Burst” as she’d been shown. This is insane, she thought. She had no idea how to use this weapon and she wasn’t sure she could hit anything.

They drove out of the airport onto a highway surrounded by desert. Right out of the gate she saw palm trees, trunks blackened and tops sheared off by explosions. Along the side of the highway was a long column of twisted wreckage, the charred and blackened remains of SUVs and trucks. Just by the amount of debris, it was clear that things had gotten a lot worse since she had been here last. A wide highway divider with flat ground, scrub and palm trees separated them from oncoming traffic.

Their SUV sped up. They were moving faster now, about sixty miles per hour. Carrie wiped the sweat out of her eyes. Along her side of the road was more of the same. Charred chassis of vehicles, mangled palm trees and scrub. In front of them was the lead Mamba, with someone on top manning the machine gun and ahead, the road, partially obscured in the distance by a yellow veil of dust. Stirred up, she assumed, from the first convoy, a couple of minutes ahead of theirs.

“Overpass ahead,” Rabbit said over his shoulder. “Get ready. The hajis like to drop grenades and IEDs down on us. Eyes open. You won’t see them till they pop up.”

“Mother,” Virgil muttered, throwing a look at Carrie indicating he didn’t like this any more than she did.

They drove under the overpass, every nerve in her body expecting something to come down on them. As they came out of the shadow, she looked back but didn’t see anyone. She was about to draw a breath when the radio crackled again.

“Get ready, people. IED Junction. Here’s where the fun starts,” Demon’s voice said.

“Always something at least once a day here,” Rabbit said, hunching over his weapon.

Carrie saw what he meant. A number of cars entered onto the highway from a feeder road. One of them, a taxi with two Arab men wearing checked kaffiyehs in the front seat, pulled toward them.

“ Imshi! Get away, dammit!” Rabbit shouted, and fired a warning burst right in front of the taxi’s front bumper, gesturing for them to back off. The taxi driver glared at them, but slowed and pulled away. Ahead, the lead Mamba was honking its horn constantly, but she couldn’t see at what. Then she saw the Mamba deliberately bump into the rear of a car in front of it and watched as the car pulled over to the side of the road to get out of the way.