Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“He tried to stop me. This is my idea,” Carrie said to Benson, and to the Iraqi prime minister she added in Arabic, “ Lahda, min fathlek , Prime Minister, but your life is in danger. You must listen.”

“Look, I don’t know who you are, miss, but this is a direct order. Get out of this room now,” Benson said.

“Ambassador, if I walk out, you and the prime minister will both be dead within the hour. So if you want to end my career tomorrow, fine, but I’m not leaving,” Carrie said.

“Who the hell is she?” Benson asked Dreyer.

“One of ours, Mr. Ambassador. You need to listen to her. She knows what she’s talking about.”

“Look, miss, thank you for your concern, but we don’t need protection. We’re in the well-guarded Green Zone, surrounded by American troops in the most protected building in the Green Zone, not to mention ISF guarding these offices. Your concern is unnecessary,” Benson said.

“And with all due respect to you, sir, AQI has infiltrated the ISF and they won’t give a shit who you are when they kill you. And if you could pull your head out of your own self-important ass for one second you’d realize that it doesn’t matter if they kill you. You’ll be replaced. But if they kill him”-she pointed at al-Waliki-“the Shiites go nuts and this whole country erupts in full-scale civil war.”

“What is this? Some kind of a joke?” Benson snapped.

“I just came from Ramadi last night covered in blood from one of my guys. Do I look like I’m joking? Right now, we need to get you and the prime minister to a safe location without anyone knowing. We have to do it immediately. Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“You and the prime minister both. We’re going to disguise you,” she said, and repeated it in Arabic for al-Waliki, then turned to Dreyer. “We need an absolutely safe location within the Convention Center. Someplace the ISF won’t look and that can hold at least a half dozen or more U.S. soldiers just to make sure they’ll be okay. Any ideas?”

“There are some rooms in the basement under the big round auditorium, the one where the parliament meets,” one of the CIA men said. “I heard someone say Saddam’s secret police used to use them for all kinds of shit. Drugs, interrogations, rape.”

“Charming,” Dreyer muttered.

At that moment, Captain Mullins arrived with a squad of soldiers in full combat gear, along with an Iraqi officer wearing the red ISF beret.

“You Carrie?” Mullins asked. He was a small, muscular man, about five seven, with brown eyes that took in everything in an instant.

“Why aren’t you at your posts?” the Iraqi officer said to the two ISF guards in Arabic.

“I needed them here. You’ll understand in a minute,” Carrie told him in Arabic. Then to Mullins, she said, “We need to get Ambassador Benson and Prime Minister al-Waliki to safety. This man, what’s your name?” She pointed at the CIA agent who’d mentioned the storage rooms.

“Tom. Tom Rosen,” he said.

“Tom will show you where to take them. We need men we can absolutely trust to guard them. How many men did you bring?” she asked Mullins.

“Two ODAs. A Teams. Twenty-four men, not counting me,” he said.

“How many can you spare? I need at least three or four,” she said. “They, plus our CIA staff can protect them. You’ve got the extra uniforms?”

One of Mullins’s men handed Carrie two pairs of ACUs, desert camouflage fatigues, and two M4s. She gave them to Benson and the prime minister.

“Put these on,” she told them. “You’ll pretend to be soldiers.” She turned to the ISF officer. “We want everyone else in the ISF to think they are still meeting in this office,” she told him in Arabic, motioning him closer. “Get fellow Shiites, men you know and trust, if possible from your own tribe. You need to find the AQI infiltrators. As soon as we leave, no one gets in or out of the Convention Center. Any Sunni soldier in this building who joined the ISF within the last three months is suspect. Disarm every one of them and turn them over to us for interrogation. They are not to be harmed, understand? They have critical information.”

She turned and translated for Dreyer what she had told him.

“And, Perry, whatever you do, don’t let them get rid of them or let them buy their way out. We need intel from whoever they take in as prisoner,” she said to Dreyer.

Prime Minister al-Waliki stood and faced her. “You, CIA lady. I won’t do this. I can’t hide. What if someone sees me dressed like an American soldier? Politically, it would be the end of me,” he said in English.

“You have no choice,” she told him in Arabic. “Sunni elements of al-Qaeda are already inside the building. If they kill you, Iraq will split apart. There will be civil war. You know this better than anyone, Prime Minister. Then Saddam wins. He may die, but he wins. Put on the clothes for just an hour or two. Stay alive.”

Suddenly, the boom of a massive explosion rattled the windows. It was followed by additional booms from a cannon-Carrie was willing to bet from the 105-mm guns of the Abrams tanks-and a nonstop firestorm of small-arms fire. The battle had started.

“They’re attacking the Assassin’s Gate. Get your pants on,” she shouted at Benson. “Hurry!”

The Assassin’s Gate was a white stone arch over Haifa Street topped by a domelike sculpture that looked like an ancient Babylonian warrior’s helmet. It was about three hundred meters east of the Convention Center and had become one of the major checkpoint entries into the Green Zone. Led by one of Mullins’s team leaders, they headed east on Yafa Street, then down an alley behind the buildings toward Haifa Street, the sounds of the battle getting louder and louder the closer they got. In the gaps between the buildings, they could see Iraqis, men, women clutching children, some pushing carts, all running the other way on Yafa Street, fleeing the fighting.

They stopped beside a building, looking out toward a parking lot behind the children’s hospital. It was a big open area bordered by bushes. If the insurgents had taken over the hospital, they could be walking into an ambush. The sounds of the battle were very loud, an almost nonstop staccato of automatic-weapons fire punctuated by booming cannon fire. They could see the flashes of gunfire coming from the windows of the children’s hospital.

They formed into two A Teams, Alpha and Bravo, and gave Carrie the code name “Outlaw.” Master Sergeant Travis, on point for A Team Alpha, signaled that he was going in. A moment later, as he sprinted toward the parking lot, the other team members took up positions behind parked cars to provide covering fire as needed. But there was no fire from mujahideen from the windows or from the parking lot. As Captain Mullins had anticipated, everything was concentrated on the Haifa Street side of the hospital, where the battle was taking place.

Although she couldn’t see the fighting at the checkpoint from here, she anticipated that Colonel Salazar had turned it into a killing zone. With tanks and troops dug in to defend the checkpoint and more men and Bradleys brought up from behind to box the mujahideen in, it was plenty loud enough. What the big blast had been-an IED or a car bomb or something-she didn’t know, but it meant Americans had likely taken casualties too.

Warrant Officer Blazell, whom the others called “Crimson” because he came from Alabama, a six-foot-six, shaved-headed, midthirties African-American whom Mullins had assigned to look after her, tapped her on the shoulder and indicated that she should follow him as the team zigzagged across the parking lot, where two A Team members had already taken control of the back door to the hospital.