Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (8 page)

With a final crash of breaking windshield glass, the jeep came to a stop exactly as Constantine had feared it would: upside down.

And he still had his head between his legs.

He felt sodden earth pressing against his arched back. Men groaned around him—the one on the left was limp and silent. Probably dead. Constantine might die himself here, crushed into a curled potato-bug shape by the jeep and the men on either side, with his face aimed right at his own arse. The Devil would be chuckling over that one. Maybe Lucifer had given the jeep an extra flip.

Constantine pushed at the earth with his back muscles, his feet pressing the metal floor, trying to tilt the jeep a little. It didn’t budge. Someone was weeping, babbling in Farsi. Was that leaking petrol he smelled?

Then the man on Constantine’s right started struggling, groaning, wriggling. The overturned jeep was slanted, and there was more room on that side. In under a minute—it seemed to take five times as long to Constantine, as he was beginning to have trouble breathing with his diaphragm compressed by his curled position—the man was free, and Constantine was able to squirm to that side, pushing against the floor of the jeep—a ceiling for him now—and, almost dislocating several vertebrae, he squirmed to the side, turned his face toward the ground, and used his arms and elbows to drag himself free, choking in the fumes of petrol dripping from the cracked fuel tank . . .

“Oh, shite of Satan,” he muttered, forcing himself to stand. “Cocked up me back . . .”

Automatically, still dazed, he fumbled in his coat for a cigarette, found his old-fashioned Zippo lighter but remembered that he had no cigarettes. Jesus but his back hurt . . .

“You die for this,” said the man behind him.

Constantine turned, the motion slow and painful, and saw one of the gunmen, face masked in blood, beard matted with it, one eye missing, pointing an old Luger pistol at him.

“What?
I
didn’t crash the jeep!” Constantine protested, taking a step back. It was only a half-lie.

“I don’t know how you make this, but you make this, and you die . . .”

Constantine flicked the Zippo lighter and tossed it at the jeep. The bearded gunman watched it arc toward the spreading pool of petrol and shouted a single syllable of warning. Then the explosion picked him up in a fireball and flung him pinwheeling through the air to fall, burning and broken, a few yards to Constantine’s left, the same shockwave knocking Constantine onto his back.

“Ow,” Constantine said as he struck the ground.

But when he sat up, he found that his cricked back had been straightened out by the fall. It felt rather better now. Found his lighter intact a few feet away, too. His eyebrows seemed singed, but apart from that, it’d turned out rather better than he’d hoped, he reflected, as he started toward Rasht.

He glanced over his shoulder at the overturned jeep, burning furiously, enveloped by a great crackling orange flame striated in soot. The others had all died in the crash, or shortly after, luckily. Would have been unpleasant to hear them screaming as they burned to death.

Of course, right now, they might well be screaming in the flames of Muslim Hell.

But he hadn’t lit that one.

Tikrit, Iraq

Paul Gatewood made a point of trying not to think about the ghosts he’d seen. He’d pushed them out of his mind. But sometimes they came back in.

Private Gatewood knew that the others thought he was out of it, although he hadn’t told them about the ghosts—the old man, the young soldier. (Could a ghost be old—or young?)

But he had pretty much stopped talking to the rest of the squadron about anything unnecessary. He spent a lot of time staring at the shadows, half expecting to see the ghosts in there. He knew the others thought he was suffering from battle fatigue, or pretending to—some guys pretended to be losing it in the hopes of getting shipped home.

Some of the other soldiers looked at him suspiciously as he got out of the armored car. Gatewood was part of the evening’s reinforcements for the push into Tikrit. The Sunni insurgents had been massacring Kurds in this town, pretty much whenever they felt like it. Gatewood’s company was supposed to put a stop to it in this sector. But from the chatter on the radio, it’d seemed all they’d accomplished was to get two men shot by a sniper, one guy shot by friendly fire, a troop transport blown to hell by an IED, and two or three civilian bystanders shot dead. There was rumored to be an RPG guerilla in the area somewhere, too.

Easy to screw up in the dark. Most of the lights in this sector had been shot out. The city hereabouts was a jumble of blocky buildings, concrete and clay, with big areas of rubbled vacant lots, inky with shadow. There were a few pockets of light, cast by distant streetlights, thin by the time it got over here; a little more light stingily distributed by the quarter moon. The soldiers used flashlights and lanterns sparingly, not wanting to give any help to the snipers. When the shooting did come, you mostly couldn’t see who was shooting at you. Sometimes you caught a muzzle flash on a rooftop, or in the mouth of an alley; sometimes not. Other times what seemed an enemy muzzle flash came from your own men.

Gatewood was thinking about this, and about how he could have gone to officer’s candidate school and had instead signed up for the fast track to combat after 9/11, wanting to go to Afghanistan. Since it would have been smart to send a motivated soldier to Afghanistan, they sent him to South Korea, and then Iraq.

“Gatewood!” the sarge called, a voice out of the darkness, “you go with Binsdale’s platoon, check out that house at the end of the street. We got intel there’s a guy with an un-ID’d weapon hiding down there somewhere.”

“Sure, Sarge,” Gatewood said, his heart sinking. Binsdale wasn’t a bad guy, but his outfit meant Vintara and Marquand, too. They’d become inseparable. Marquand had pictures of Timothy McVeigh in his room at the base.

Gatewood circled the edge of the group of men till he found Binsdale, who looked disappointed that Gatewood was coming along. He didn’t like people second-guessing him, and Gatewood had a way of doing that. Also, Binsdale figured—Gatewood was pretty sure that Binsdale figured this—that Gatewood was crazy.

Maybe I am,
Gatewood thought.
Maybe I hallucinated that old man, that ghost soldier.

You must survive, so you can find a way . . .

Kind of thing a guy with battle fatigue might hear, after all. Not that Gatewood had been in all that many battles . . .

He followed Binsdale and Muny, a stocky black guy carrying a SAW, joining the rest of the platoon toward the end of the street. He hoped Binsdale had the house right. Seemed to Gatewood that about every fourth time they were told to check out a certain house for hostiles or guns it turned out they were in the wrong house.

As it happened, there was only one house at the end of the dead-end street. The surrounds were all rubble and vacant lots; to one side was the wreckage of a small mosque. The house they were to probe had been hastily constructed in one of Saddam’s abortive housing projects, a squarish two-story structure of cinder blocks and plasterboard. A light burned in an upstairs window.

“You see that window up there?” Marquand hissed. He was a man with his head shaved bald, taped-together glasses, thin lips always curled into a disapproving sneer. “Could be a sniper right there, right now. We could just chuck a grenade right through it. Report said someone was sniping from this end of the street.”

“Chances are they were using that old mosque, one of these busted-up places here,” Binsdale said.

“So why don’t we check out the mosque?” Muny asked.

“Because orders are to check out the house. Now shut the fuck up and take Marquand and Gatewood and Vintara and go around back, see no one runs out with a weapon, tries to hide, nothing like that. Me and Norquist and Lemon’ll go in at the front.”

Gatewood cringed inwardly at the thought of going on any kind of mission with Marquand. Glancing at Marquand, Muny didn’t seem to like the idea much either. “Shouldn’t we have a battering ram, knock the door in?”

“We’ll get something like that if it’s locked—now get gone.”

Gatewood trailed after Muny and Vintara and Marquand, his assault rifle feeling heavy in his hands.

Vintara switched on the little flashlight attached to the barrel of his rifle and they picked their way around the side of the house, over chunks of concrete, asphalt, broken glass, and patches of dog shit. The dog in question growled at them from the darkness of the lot beside the house, but they couldn’t see him. Gatewood hoped the dog didn’t come to investigate—Vintara liked to shoot stray dogs for fun.

There was a door around back and someone was coming out when they got there. It was a frightened-looking man in a knee-length white shirt, with three days’ growth of beard, and a boy of about ten, in shorts; the boy took them in with wide brown eyes. “Not to shoot!” the man said, one hand around his son, clasping the boy to him, the other raised imploringly.

“Back in the house!” Gatewood said, stepping up and pointing at the door with his rifle. He was trying to get some kind of handle on the situation. Marquand and Vintara might do anything, left to their own devices.

The boy and his father backed into the house, the boy gaping at them in as much amazement as fear. The room, dimly lit with a kerosene lamp, contained a legless brown sofa, a threadbare braided rug, a few books in Arabic script piled beside the sofa, a small television with a wire-hanger antenna, and some half-dressed action figures—the Justice League—that could have come from an American Toys “R” Us, scattered on the floor. The room smelled heavily of cooked meat, tobacco, and some spice Gatewood wasn’t able to identify.

“Found one weapon!” Binsdale said from the front room. “Was in the closet up there . . .” He came in with the others, tossed a sawed-off shotgun on the sofa.

“Sawed-off is some pretty serious firepower,” Vintara observed.

“For bandits!” the man said. “Drive taxi, I am taxi drive making! Bandits, all the time bandits!”

“Everybody uses that excuse,” Marquand said.

Don’t say anything,
Gatewood implored himself.
Go along with them for once . . .

“You got a coalition permit for that weapon there, Dad?” Vintara asked.

“Permit, yes! In my taxi, is in my taxi!”

“Oh right, somewhere outside,” Marquand said. “I didn’t see any taxi.”

“Is in mosque, so no one steals!”

“We’ll check it out later,” Binsdale said. “What about upstairs?”

“My brother, sick there, he is sick, please, no disturb!” the man said, looking at the ceiling.

“Oh yeah?” Marquand snorted. “Maybe your brother’s ‘Ali Baba’!”

“No, no Ali Baba, no insurgent! Makes wood!”

Vintara sniggered at Marquand. “I’ll
bet
he likes to make wood!”

“Probably a carpenter,” Gatewood muttered. “I’ll check out upstairs, Corporal, if you want . . .”

“Vintara, you go with him. Yell if you see anything shady at all.”

Gatewood nodded, headed for the narrow concrete stairs. He led the way, again trying to keep a step ahead of Vintara, and ascending with his rifle at ready.

Upstairs was a narrow hallway with two doors opening to the right. The first was a bathroom with a tub rusting around the edges, a toilet, a few shaving implements. The next opened into a bedroom; there was a lamp on a table that was just a sheet of wood over sawhorses, illuminating a bed on the floor where a man writhed and whimpered. But he sat bolt upright when Gatewood stepped into the room, Vintara crowding in beside him.

“Brother” was a shirtless, sweating man with sickly yellow cast, a scraggly beard, wild black eyes, matted hair.

“Hands up!” Vintara said.

The man just sat there, his lower lip quivering, one eye twitching.

“The guy is out of it, man,” Gatewood said. “He’s no threat to anyone.”

“He’s just scared he’s been caught. He could be on the most-wanted list, Gatewood, you don’t fucking know.” He pushed by Gatewood and aimed his gun at the man on the bed. “Get your ass up! Hands where I can see ’em!”

“Vintara, I don’t think he speaks English!”

“He understands me! Hands up! Now!”

“What you got?” Binsdale called from below.

“Some guy in bed—looks feverish or crazy!” Gatewood called.

“His head!” the dad said. “Please, his head! He is hurt his head!”

“I said
get up!”
Vintara bellowed—and he fired a warning shot into the ceiling.

The man on the bed screeched and snatched at something in the shadows beside the bed. He swung it around between him and Vintara—who shot him right through the copy of the Qu’ran he was trying to keep between them.

The man gave a final yelp, his back arching. He thrashed on the bed, spurting blood.

“Jesus!” Gatewood burst out.

There was a responding pandemonium from below—shouting, a thud, a sputter of gunshots.

“I got this one, he was going for a gun!” Vintara shouted. He started down the stairs.

Gatewood went to look at the dying man—gone limp now, his breath coming in fast little gasps.

There was a neat bullet hole right through the Qu’ran—and beside the bed, something else. Medicine bottles. Gatewood picked one of them up and went to the stairs.

He was stalling about going downstairs. He could tell by the sounds . . . there was something down there he didn’t want to see. He made himself go down into the living room.

The soldiers were standing around, staring at the body on the sofa. The boy’s dad was sprawled facedown over the sofa, motionless, the back of his head shot away.

“He went for the shotgun,” Marquand said. The muzzle of his assault rifle was smoking. “When he heard the shots upstairs . . .”

“I don’t know—maybe he was going for it,” Binsdale said, shaking his head.

“Maybe,” Muny said, staring at the body. “Maybe he was just running by the fucking sofa.”

“What, you want to take a chance, Muny?”

“Where’s the kid?” Gatewood asked. The boy was nowhere to be seen.

Binsdale let out a long slow, sighing breath. “Oh—he ran off. When we . . . when Marquand shot his pops.”