Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

Our target building in Qa’im was like a cubist interpretation of a target building: its cinder blocks were stacked precariously; its windows appeared to be an assembly of fractured windows. After the gas cans blew—further destabilizing the walls and shattering the windows for good—small-arms fire rained down from adjacent buildings.

I was standing off the corner of the target building, waiting for Spot to send me in, when the ambush triggered. I took cover in an alley overgrown with ragweed. By the sound of the onslaught—AKs clattering, RPGs whistling in—we were surrounded and outnumbered. Any second, I figured, the enemy would press his attack. Rounds hit short, spraying dirt. Gunmen shouted to one another, roof to roof. Something moved in the alley across the street. I sparkled, and there was Spot with my laser on his chest. Infrared waves converged, as if Spot were drawing energy from the cinder-block wall he leaned against, the ragweed that partially concealed him, and the cool night air above. Seeing me, Spot signaled, Come.

Spot covered me as I ran across the street. Glass crunched underfoot. Bullets ricocheted off the pavement. I ducked into the alley and leaned against the wall opposite Spot. I remained standing and fired one way while Spot knelt and fired the other. I felt his rounds zip past my abdomen. Smoke poured from the broken windows of the target building. The enemy’s rooftop shouts grew anxious. Spot and I fell into an on-and-off rhythm, like men working on the railroad. Our rifles clanged like two sledgehammers striking the same metal spike. I either killed a dude on a roof or he ducked down in the nick of time. A door opened up the street from the target building, and J.J. appeared.

I covered Spot as he ran to J.J. Spot and J.J. covered me. I followed them through the door and into a living room. The three of us vaulted a couch. We crashed into a kitchen that smelled like meat about to turn. A woman, upstairs, screamed. Spot reached to open the back door and an RPG detonated in the living room behind us. Firelight illuminated the kitchen. I could see in J.J.’s and Spot’s faces that we might not make it. Both of Spot’s eyes were fixed on the same point. He counted, One, two, three, then flung open the back door. We ran into an alley, firing at windows, doorways, and shadows on all sides.

Now Hit was shaping up to be something of a milk run. Or so I thought until I saw the infrared waves, in Bobby’s sparkle, reversed. Did waves diverging from the laser mean that we were fucked? Or was it waves converging, à la Qa’im? Had we, in fact, been fucked at Qa’im? It could’ve been so much worse. Lou had taken a nail in the thigh, which he’d yanked out with a pair of pliers on the helicopter ride back to the outpost. He’d held up the nail, bent and bloody, for all to see, before chucking it out the helo’s open ramp, into the night.

Bobby stopped sparkling the storm drain and continued walking up the street. Lou, not even limping, stepped off behind Bobby. It was uphill, maybe a quarter mile, to the intersection where we’d turn south toward the highway, the railroad tracks, and the desert beyond. J.J., still standing under the shot-out streetlight, took another drag of his imaginary cigarette. Then, all at once: Lou sparkled a pile of trash; Zsa-Zsa sparkled a bedsheet hanging from a rooftop clothesline; and Tull sparkled a ground-floor window, making it surge like a portal to another dimension.

“This ain’t Dark Side of the fuckin’ Moon laser light show!” Spot radioed, and all the sparkles went dark.

SUNRISE, BACK AT our outpost: decelerating rotor blades cast zoetrope shadows on the LZ. The pilots unstrapped, the gunners folded belts of 7.62 into ammo cans, and the troop walked toward the huts. I unassed the trail helicopter, then assisted the boy in the same way I’d assisted him from the curb outside his home, through the streets of Hit, across the highway and railroad tracks, and into the desert, where the helos had picked us up. Now I guided the boy, still hooded and zip-tied, to crouch under the dipping rotor blades. We met J.J., Spot, and Mike beside the twisted and rusty hatch of a bombed-out ammo dump.

“You seen him fucking around in his pockets?” J.J. asked me.

Spot held the box, which was somehow blacker in daylight.

“No,” I said. “I was taking his computer apart.”

“Little something called situational awareness,” Spot said. “Heard of it?”

Spot’s bad eye stared directly into the sun. He handed me the black box to take back to the lab.

“And what the fuck happened with you?” J.J. asked Mike.

“I missed,” Mike said.

“Then what?” Spot asked.

“His hands were up,” Mike said.

The wind blew, the ammo dump’s rusty door creaked on its hinges, and I saw inside. Sunlight slanted through multiple bomb holes in the roof.

Spot said to J.J., “I guess we shoot once, then wait to see if the target’s had a change of heart.”

“I guess so,” J.J. said.

From the ammo dump I escorted the boy north along the outpost’s only road. Plywood huts lined either side. We passed Spot and J.J.’s hut, Lou and Mike’s. We yielded to Zsa-Zsa, in his silk robe, on the way to the shower. We sidestepped the tractor tire that Tull liked to flip end over end while working on his core.

I didn’t pull on the boy’s arm, and he didn’t try to break free. He just put one foot in front of the other, as he had for the entire journey from Hit, moving not too fast and not too slow. And never once had he veered off course, even during that long stretch across the desert when I’d let go of his arm. Where any other detainee would’ve booked it and I would’ve had to chase him down, the boy had simply walked right alongside me, hooded and handcuffed, the brass buckles on his loafers flashing in the starlight.

The boy was, without a doubt, the most cooperative detainee I’d ever had to walk out of anywhere. After we’d reached the pickup zone—a hard patch of dirt three miles west of Hit—I’d sat him down on the most comfortable rock I could find. I’d given him fresh water and pound cake from my escape-and-evade stash. I’d even thought about calling the terp over to help me explain to the boy what was about to happen, right before it happened.

The helicopters had dropped out of the sky with a hellacious screech. We were sandblasted, mercilessly. The boy had panicked and tried to run, and though I couldn’t blame him, I couldn’t let that happen, either. So I’d dragged him under the spinning rotors, kicking and writhing, as sand got in my eyes and tears rolled up my face. I’d tossed him into the bird like a bale of hay. Then I’d jumped on top of the boy so he wouldn’t slide out the open door as the helo made a climbing turn toward the outpost.

Once we were level and headed southwest, I’d propped the boy up against the cockpit firewall, facing aft. I’d sat at his feet with my legs hanging out the door. I’d watched the sun rise and daybreak brighten the face of the boy’s hood. Power lines had flashed below the helicopter’s skids. Goats had run in counterclockwise circles in their pens. Above, a flock of cranes, scared by the helicopters’ noise, had tucked their wings and dive-bombed us, missing the rotors by inches.

At the north end of the outpost’s solitary road was the Facility, where we kept the detainees, though not for long. Just a day or two, usually, or whatever time it took to run a few interrogations. Those who we considered guilty were transferred to a higher-level institution outside Baghdad. Those who we deemed innocent we’d drive east to within walking distance of the highway; then we’d release them with as much water as they wanted to carry, and twenty bucks so they might negotiate a ride home. Those men must’ve told their stories, which must’ve been repeated by others, which meant that the boy might’ve heard them. Which meant that he might’ve known about the helicopter ride and the walk down this straight, dusty road. He might’ve also heard that at the end of the road, we’d climb three stairs and enter a stuffy room that smelled like bleach. Now we stood in the Facility’s lobby. The door banged shut behind us, and the boy jumped.