Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

Now she saw that one car after another was pulling over to the side of the highway to let their convoy by, the Iraqis in them watching them from the side of the road, their expressions unreadable.

They passed under another overpass, training their weapons up at it, and then another. There was a crater in the road from a past IED explosion and the convoy slowed to go around it.

Suddenly a woman in a black abaya with two little boys appeared on the side of the highway ahead of them, near the wreckage of a car that hadn’t been cleared away yet. She was holding a basket. They were in Carrie’s field of fire.

“Two o’clock! Woman with a basket and children!” she called out. The woman beckoned at them, holding the basket toward them. My God! she thought. Was there an IED in the basket? She didn’t know what to do.

“Don’t fire yet,” Rabbit shouted as they trained their weapons on the woman and the two children. What is going on here? Carrie thought. What are we doing?

“ Balah! ” the woman cried, waving at them as they slowed to go around the wrecked car.

“Wait!” Carrie cried. “She’s selling dates!”

“Don’t shoot!” Rabbit shouted.

Carrie moved her finger away from the trigger. As they passed, the smaller of the boys waved at them. This place is surreal, she thought, her heart beating like a snare drum.

They slowed again at a highway checkpoint formed by APCs and manned by Iraqi Army soldiers watched over by a pair of U.S. Marines. The Iraqi soldiers waved them through with hardly a glance and they sped up again. A highway sign read, “Qadisaya Expressway.”

Suddenly, she heard an incredibly loud explosion and saw a massive orange fireball blossom a few hundred yards ahead of them. A blast of heat and a whiff of explosive came back at them like a hot wind.

“Shit,” Rabbit murmured.

“What is it?” Carrie asked.

“Convoy ahead of us,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

A minute later, they had to slow to drive around the shattered hulk of an SUV exactly like theirs, completely engulfed in flames, emitting a thick, acrid column of black smoke hundreds of feet into the air. Next to it was the smoldering hulk of another destroyed vehicle, nothing left of it but the chassis. Car bomb, Carrie thought automatically as they maneuvered past. She could feel the heat of the flames on her skin. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of explosive.

Because of the flames, she couldn’t see anyone inside, but there was a man’s arm lying yards away on the highway. They were going to drive right past it, maybe over it. Nauseous, she forced herself to swallow to keep from throwing up. As they drove by, she couldn’t take her eyes off the severed arm. It lay there, palm up, the fingers perfect, untouched, even relaxed looking. Two Blackwater men were carrying a third man, his upper body drenched in blood. They brought him to an SUV stopped in the middle of the highway, its door open.

It must’ve just happened, she thought, sickened and suddenly reminded of the way it had been for her in Iraq before, that this place was for real; she could die any second. She was suddenly terrified. And yet, she felt more alive than she had ever felt in her life. Each pore of her skin was like a receptor sensing every atom in the air around her.

This is like one of my flights, she thought. This was true insanity. And yet. And yet. This was who she truly was.

As they started to speed up, the M240 and the M4s from the right side of the Mamba in front of them opened up. Everyone on the right side of the Mamba, her side, was shooting. Following the flight of the machine gun’s tracers, it looked like they were firing at the roof of a sandstone-colored building about a hundred meters from the highway. God, she thought, seeing a flash of fire from there. Someone was shooting at them.

“Snipers. Fire, dammit!” Rabbit shouted, firing his M4 at the roof of the building as well.

Carrie tried, but she couldn’t see who was shooting at them, though her nerves screamed in expectation of a bullet hitting her at any second. The harsh rip of M4 bursts from Rabbit and the man behind her sounded unbelievably loud in her ears. She put her finger on the trigger, not knowing what to do as they drew opposite the building. Then she saw it.

She could see the outline of someone up there and before she realized what she was doing, she squeezed the trigger blindly, feeling the M4 move in her hands. She squeezed off another, the shots sounding very loud, although she was positive she hadn’t come near hitting whoever it was. Before she could even see what happened, they were speeding away. She felt a terrible urge to urinate and tightened to hold it in. She put the safety selector back to “Safe.”

After what seemed like an hour but must’ve been barely a minute later, they exited the highway, the lead Mamba honking and bumping into Iraqi cars to get them out of their way as they headed toward the Green Zone checkpoint. The streets were crowded with cars and motorbikes and people. Through the window came a smell of dust and diesel and rotting garbage.

The checkpoint was ahead of them: concertina wire; concrete blast walls, some decorated with graffiti; sandbags; concrete turn barriers in the roadway; a queue of cars and a long line of people going through inspection and metal detectors to get in, watched over by an M1 Abrams tank and a detachment of U.S. Army soldiers. They snaked their way around the serpentine turn barriers and stopped briefly at the checkpoint, where a contractor who looked exactly like a soldier except for the Blackwater shoulder patch on his shirt waved them on through.

Passing by the blast walls, it was as if they had landed on another planet. They were on a wide avenue lined with palm trees, villas with green lawns and gardens, monumental buildings with pointed domes like something out of The Arabian Nights and, in the distance, the sun shining on the Tigris River. They drove past a monument with giant crossed curved swords over the entrance to what looked like a vast parade ground. Near it was what looked like a big concrete flying saucer with its hatch open. She remembered it from her last trip, but Rabbit, assuming she was a newbie, pointed it out.

“Monument to the Unknown Soldier,” Rabbit said as they continued on down the avenue, finally turning left past some government buildings in grassy open spaces, then right onto Yafa Street and pulling up at the entrance to a tall building with a dry fountain with statues in front that sooner or later, every foreigner who wasn’t tied down in the military got to know: the Al-Rasheed Hotel.

“Do you want to check in or go over to the Convention Center?” Virgil asked as they unloaded. The Convention Center was where the Iraqi Provisional Government and U.S. government agencies had offices.

“Convention Center,” she said, checking the safety was back on and handing her M4 to Rabbit.

“You did good,” he said.

“I was scared to death,” she said.

“Me too.” He grinned and waved.

She and Virgil, pulling their rolling suitcases behind them, walked across the wide boulevard and showed their IDs to U.S. Marines stationed behind sandbags outside the Convention Center building’s wrought-iron and concrete fence. The Convention Center was a giant fortresslike building made of gray concrete. It looked like a fortification from World War I.

They showed their IDs again to American MPs manning the entrance and went inside. Instantly, they were hit by the air-conditioning, and after asking, they eventually found an office with a sign on the door that said “USAID Baghdad,” the U.S. government aid agency. They knocked and went inside.

They were shown to an office waiting room, where they sat and waited while a young American man in a Marine Service C uniform shirt and tie, military written all over him, went to get someone. A U.S. Marine captain, also in Service Cs, came out of an inner office.