Brian Haig - Man in the middle

I, also, stared at Bian. She avoided my eyes.

"What did you just do?"

After a moment without a reply, I told her what she had done. "You just shot unarmed prisoners."

She glanced at me, and for a moment I wondered if I was next.

"Hand me your weapon, Bian."

She did not hand me her weapon but did say, "I didn't kill them."

"Your weapon-now."

"I did what was needed. And it worked."

She straightened up and for a moment seemed to contemplate what she had done. I examined her face, and did not like what I saw; she should have looked shocked, or enraged, but instead she struck me as completely in control of her emotions and senses. Aloof, actually. Finally, she said in a surprisingly calm tone, "Sean, please. Go downstairs. Tell Eric we need him and his men up here right away."

"You go downstairs. I'm not leaving you alone with these men."

Instead of addressing that thought, she said, "Give me your chador, please."

I thought she was going to use it to sponge or stem the flow of blood from one of the men she had just shot. So I handed it to her, keeping a spring in my step and an eye on her weapon. Instead she bent over and used it to gag Nervous Nellie, who was making whiny noises and looked ready to empty his bowels into his pants.

Then the door burst open and the argument was settled about either of us going downstairs. Eric and two of his men came barging through the doorway, weapons directed at us.

"It's safe," I yelled before anyone made a nervous mistake. "We're in control."

Eric lowered his weapon and examined the bodies on the floor. He said, "What the fuck?"

He was not expecting a reply, and continued, in a furious tone, "Didn't I tell you two to keep your weapons on safe? Holy shit-those shots were heard for ten blocks around."

I looked at him, then at Bian, and suddenly I understood what- and more to the point, why-she had done what she'd done. The message from Charabi to Daniels had described Ali bin Pacha as having lost his left leg, and therefore Bian had fired into their knees, a field expedient method for determining whose legs were real and whose were not.

I faced Eric and said, "Dress their wounds, and cuff and gag all of them."

"The hell with that. Those shots alerted every jihadi in this sector. Time to leave-now."

"Do it." I pointed at Nervous Nellie, and then at Joe Cool-aka Ali bin Pacha-who was observing me with a look of calculation from the floor. "They're the lucky two getting the all-expenses-paid trip."

"Are you nuts? Listen, in about two minutes the whole city is going to kick our asses."

I stared at him. He stared back.

He shook his head and turned to his two men. "All right. Hurry."

But Ali bin Pacha had other ideas. He suddenly pushed himself to his feet and launched himself at Bian, who was paying too much attention to our conversation and not enough to the guy her back was turned to.

He yanked the M16 from her hands and spun. It happened so suddenly that, before I could move, I was staring down a gun barrel.

I saw that it was pointed at my face, and in the brief instant I had to observe his eyes and face, I saw that his diffidence had disappeared; his lips were curled into a nasty smile, and his dark eyes were blazing with intense hatred.

I squeezed shut my eyes and heard a shot, amazed that I didn't feel my brains fly out the back of my skull.

When I opened my eyes, bin Pacha stood with his weapon pointed at the floor, and he was looking back at me with equal amazement. He sank to his knees and the M16 fell out of his hands.

I was yelling, "Don't shoot him. Shit… don't shoot him." Well, Eric had already shot him.

I walked over and kicked the M16 out of bin Pacha's reach. He was teetering on his knees, and he stared into my eyes, then down at his stomach at the dark blood leaking out of a small hole in his shirt. He looked a little surprised, and a lot annoyed.

I shoved him on his back and got down on my knees and pressed down hard with my right hand on his wound. I said to nobody and everybody, "Get me a field dressing. Now."

Bian handed me a dressing. She asked, "How bad is it?"

"I don't know. It's not pumping, right? So it's not arterial. That's good. But something vital inside might be punctured." I tore open his T-shirt and examined the location of the wound. He was going into shock, mumbling incoherently, perhaps curses, perhaps prayers.

The hole was about three inches to the left of his navel. I tried to recall from my high school biology days which internal organs were located in this region. Kidneys? Spleen? Intestines, probably, and that meant a high likelihood of infection. Also, I remembered from personal experience that, as wounds go, this one really hurt.

I reached a hand underneath him and felt around. No exit wound. So the good news was there was only one exterior wound through which he could bleed to death; the bad news was he almost certainly was bleeding to death, internally.

I placed the field dressing over the hole in his stomach and wrapped the tie-offs around his back, then knotted them tightly.

As I did, Eric and his men used green rags to gag the men, field-dressed their wounds, and attached police-style plastic cuffs to their wrists. In less than a minute, everybody was gagged and wrapped, and their bleeding was stemmed, which would put one point back on the board at a war crimes tribunal.

I glanced at Bian, who looked back and nodded. This was neither the time nor the place to discuss it, but we both knew our relationship had just changed.

Eric's men hoisted Nervous Nellie and Ali bin Pacha over their shoulders and hauled them out of the room. We departed directly behind them, leaving behind a corpse, two wounded men, and a bad memory.

Evidently, Eric had already alerted his people that it was time to egress, because two cars-the silver sedan and the cramped red Corolla-were idling curbside by the entrance.

Nervous Nellie was thrown roughly in the trunk of the silver car, and I helped place bin Pacha upright in the backseat of the Corolla, where I could keep a close eye on his vital signs.

We all piled into the cars, and Eric punched the pedal and burned rubber.

Eric had his night-vision goggles on and the car's headlights off. He was pushing at least forty through narrow streets with sharp turns that were unsafe at twenty. I couldn't tell which was the more imminent threat, a bunch of pissed-off jihadis or Eric's lead foot. Then I recalled how jihadis handle prisoners and said to Eric, "Faster."

Bian and I sat on both sides of Ali bin Pacha, and with all the sharp turns, he was being tossed between us like a broken rag doll.

In less than three minutes the buildings thinned out and we were back in the outskirts of the city. I'm usually good at remembering places I've been, and saw no recognizable landmarks, so this wasn't the same way we entered-presumably Eric was following good trade-craft and varying our route. I overheard him conversing with his team, and it sounded like one or two of the other teams were trailing us, guarding our back door to be sure we made it out with our cargo.

Bian said not a word. I felt no need to tell her how I felt. I was pissed; she knew it. Not only had she shot the prisoners, she had compounded her sins with inexcusable carelessness and twice allowed the bad guys to get the drop on her. The second time nearly got my head blown off; I take this personally. Also, our precious prisoner might not live long enough for an interrogation, this whole trip might be a waste of time, and Phyllis and I were going to have a long, one-way conversation.

Anyway, we now were out of the built-up area, bouncing along the same dusty road we took into the city, and I realized that Eric had somehow found a way to take us back through the lines of Captain Yuknis's company. I checked my watch: 3:20. I relaxed. Okay, Ali bin Pacha might expire before we got to Baghdad, but that aside, the worst was behind us. What more could go wrong?