Princes of War (18 page)

Wynn looked. He couldn’t determine which building it was.

“Back up, and move that way,” he pointed and instructed Gung. “See if we can see the house he’s talking about.” Wynn twisted his head, searching. He saw D23 and 24 coming across the field. It hadn’t taken them long.

D21 pulled away and drove northward. The entire crew strained their necks looking for roofs with clotheslines. D23 evidently saw them moving because Pauls came on the radio.

“It’s about two houses up from where you are.”

Bending forward and looking up out of the front windshield, Wynn saw the clothesline and laundry. Now he had to decide how to get inside this house. He’d seen no people so far. Should they just knock on the door? This was the standard way of letting residents know Americans were looking for information. But they’d been shot at and had shot back. That was different.

In less than a minute, Gung positioned 21 next to the house. Wynn noticed his right leg was shaking. He ignored that and studied the house. Typical block multi-floored house with flat roof. A water tank on the roof. A large palm tree grew on the other side of the house, and the top of the tree towered over the roof. The contrast of the white sheets and green branches made it easier to see the laundry. And this tree as backdrop might have camouflaged a shooter.

He had to get men up on that roof, and fast. They’d search the roof, then the lower floors. If they found residents in the house, they’d interrogate them.

Wynn organized a search team. He would lead it, taking Cengo, Randell, and Singleton. As usual, his team would be called Wolf One. He’d also alerted Cooke to form Wolf Two. The teams would enter and search houses on command. Wynn didn’t want Wolf Two to go into the second house until Wolf One had finished with the first. One team in a house at a time. This allowed the other team to support if either had trouble.

The Humvees were in place now, cordoning the area. The Wolf One team rallied at D21. He ordered Gung to pull D21 up to the house, close enough so the men could climb up from the top of the truck, and with the assistance of a buddy, get up on the roof.

Singleton watched the rooflines. So far he’d seen no one. The first man would go up, clear the far side of the roof, and then signal for the other three to follow. Normally there was a way into the house from the roof. They wouldn’t know for sure until they got up there. But going in from the roof was the better way to search a house that might have insurgents in it. Going down had tactical advantages: it was safer and less expected. And insurgents couldn’t roll grenades down the stairs at them.

Singleton saw the clothesline suddenly vibrate and one of the white garments flutter. He reported it.

“Eyes on!” Wynn yelled up, chopping his arm in the direction of the roof. Every man aimed his gun at the roof. Seconds passed, and he saw nothing. He got up on D21 and climbed to the roof, scratching two fingertips raw clambering up. On the roof he took a knee, weapon up, scanned from left to right, looking for any kind of movement. Bright sun washed the rooftop like a superheated varnish. The roof was maybe 35 by 50 feet. He saw no one. Why had the garments fluttered? Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe Singleton misjudged.

Once the team climbed to the roof and secured it, the men found the roof door. They’d seen nothing suspicious on the roof. They looked around for shell casings and saw none. Wynn walked around the roof a second time, looking. Nothing left behind. Maybe the shooter had not been on this roof after all. Maybe Ulricht had been wrong.

Wynn check again and got confirmation they were on the right roof.

Confident the roof was clear, Wynn signaled that they approach the access door leading to the floor below. Two men went to each side of the door. Randall looked for booby-trap wires and signs that something might be hidden in the door frame. He saw nothing. Wynn signaled and Randall breeched the door with two hard kicks. The door flung open. The stairwell leading down was dark, narrow, and cavernous. It had a dank pungent smell, like urine in an alley. Their eyesight took several seconds to adjust after the bright sunlight outside. Three thin diagonal cylinders of light came out of the wall, shining miniature spotlights on the stairs just above the landing. Singleton, the lead man, aimed his weapon down the stairs. Maybe ten steps lay ahead and then the stairwell made a left onto the next floor.

Wynn could see around Singleton’s shoulder. He assumed the landing below led to more rooms, but he wasn’t sure. A delay could be dangerous and allow more time for an ambush to get ready. On the other hand, moving too fast might mean making a mistake. He was committed now; they needed to continue.

Wynn patted Singleton on the thigh, signaling him to move, and the big man led the way down the stairwell. As they descended, light shafts came from holes made by Ulrich’s bullets. Once at the bottom of the stairs, each man rushed to one of four designated places in the first room they entered, rapidly scanning everything with their eyes. Nobody in the room. The room was modestly furnished. Soiled carpet. Two low sofas, several small tables. Nothing on the walls. A door to another room was on the back wall.

Singleton and Wynn moved across the room to the other door. Singleton kicked a table out of the way with his foot. Then he looked under the carpet. Without hesitating, he rolled the carpet up end to end. Randall looked under both sofas. Nothing.

They continued into the back room beyond the door. A bedroom. Lights, desk, and chests. All of them—Wynn, Randell, Singleton, Gung—held their guns up, scanning, alert to any movement, all their senses dialed to maximum sensitivity.

Nothing. Nobody in the room.

“The mattress?” Wynn asked, pointing at it with his rifle, signaling Randall to check under it.

Randall moved. He lifted the mattress. Nothing was under it. He dropped it.

Singleton scrutinized the ceiling, looking for a scuttle hole.

They returned to the other room, intending to continue down the next flight of stairs. Wynn studied the walls, looking for any signs of a hiding place. He glanced out a window. The sun, ignoring their predicament, shone bright and fierce, scorching the ground almond white.

The column of four men worked their way slowly but steadily down to the ground floor. Wynn felt like he was physically connected to each of them. One man followed another: four men, working as one. Eyes ahead, slightly hunched posture, extended arms holding gun stocks and hand grips, making the same movements, equidistant and at the same pace, like train cars linked together on a perilous journey.

The bottom floor had more rooms and appeared to be the main living area. Upstairs were bedrooms. Wynn looked around. Still quiet. No strange movement.

It appeared nobody was in the house.
What did this mean?
Had the occupants been chased out by the sniper? Where they hiding somewhere in the house? Had the house been vacant all along? Wynn was breathing rapidly, the bombarding unanswered questions stealing his oxygen.

The stairwell ended in a hallway which ran the left side of the house with rooms on the right side. Wolf One moved down the hall. The first room to the right was furnished pretty nicely. He and Randall entered, each man swiftly moving to a position in the room, dominating it.

More carpets on the floor, tables, and chairs, and one desk. They looked under all furniture and turned over each pillow.

Randall noticed a stuffed bag under a table. It looked like a laundry bag. He pulled it out. It was lumpy, like a bag of potatoes, but lightweight. A pull cord kept the bag closed. Randall prodded at the bag with his foot. It was soft. He bent down and opened it, reached his hand inside, and pulled out some children’s clothes, wadded up as if packed in a hurry. He dumped the contents of the bag on the floor. Randall shifted through the pile of clothes with his foot, saw nothing of interest, and then moved on.

The house appeared evacuated. Yet the furnishings in the house indicated recent occupancy. Clothing, books, plates, and cups remained. Maybe whoever lived here was out. Perhaps they had been chased. Insurgents were known to take over houses and threaten the former occupants with death if they talked.

Was this the right house? All Wynn had to go on was Ulricht’s belief he’d seen someone here. So far they had found nothing confirming anyone had shot from this house. Was he wasting time?

Now Singleton moved to a bookshelf. Wynn could see him fingering the tops of books, searching for anything wrong, or hidden. Randall, on the other side of the room, handled a standing lamp. He looked inside the lamp shade, then left it alone to check something else.

To the right was the kitchen. Wynn told Randall and Singleton to go search it. The kitchen had a few cabinets. The men looked inside them. Then Randall looked inside and behind a cold storage box. The box was empty.

Iraqis didn’t typically have conventional ovens. Two gas burners stood on a metal table. Randall lifted the burners off, looked under them, but found nothing.

Another door was slightly ajar on the far side of the room.

“Check that room,” Wynn told Randall, and then nodded to Singleton to assist.

The two men moved. Randall pushed the door open with the barrel of his rifle. Light from the street window beyond them shone into the dark room. Carpets on the floor. Stuffed pillows. Stacks of blankets. A prayer room.

“Check that stuff,” Wynn said loudly, again signaling with his rifle. Even mosques had been used to hide weapons and bomb-making material.

Randell went to his knees, patting down the stack of blankets, feeling for anything hard.

Suddenly Wynn heard a scraping sound. He looked to his left, saw nothing. Then he heard the sound again, from a different direction. He dropped to a knee and raised his rifle. He saw Singleton on his knees by the wall next to the stairway, pushing a chest away from the wall. That was the noise. They found nothing.

This home was furnished better than he expected and they found nothing suspicious.
What to do next?
Should he go to the next house? Wynn needed to find people, talk to someone; he had to get information in order to have any hope of finding the shooter. Of course, they might have missed the shell casings. Maybe the shooter had picked them up. Or perhaps Ulricht was wrong. Maybe one of the adjacent houses had been used by the shooter. They would need to check those too. The backside of this house, the side towards the school, had no windows. If a shooter had used this house, he must have shot from the roof. Should they go back up again and look for shell casings? No; they needed to move, needed to check other possibilities. If insurgents were still in the area they’d soon move on, or they might be setting up an ambush.

“All right, we’re going into the other houses,” Wynn told the others.

Wynn called Cooke on the radio. “Nothing here. Let’s clamp down on this place. You put a truck watching the front and back street of this area. Then have your team start at the far end—break—think there’s about five or six homes between here and there. We come towards each other, and if we have the street covered, we might luck out and catch anything between us.”

“Roger,” Cooke replied.

“We’ve got to interrogate anyone we see,” Wynn added.

“Roger.”

Any optimism Wynn had about finding the shooter was gone. He suppressed a growing sense of ineffectiveness. It felt as if hours had already passed since the shooting, as if time had been flattened and stretched by the devil. Barely 30 minutes had passed. He radioed CPT Baumann and gave him a quick update.

Wolf Two also entered their selected house through the roof. Pauls led the team. They reported entering the house to Wynn on the radio, less than five minutes after Wynn’s team had exited the first house. Wolf Two was a three-man team—Pauls, Moose, and Kale—one short of the recommended minimum number for house clearing. Cooke had not given up an additional man for fear of leaving the trucks too lightly manned to be effective.

Moose moved through the rooms in a combination of rapid and slow movements; he felt as if he was surrounded by a series of confinements, forbidding spaces within spaces, each different: small rooms followed by bigger rooms, then small rooms again. Narrow rooms by wider ones, dark by light by dark. Each room presented a new and different danger. Some oddities or abnormalities flashed. Others were detected by intense scrutiny. Closet doors unclosed. A window looked strange. A rug sagged, perhaps covering something. A box looked out of place. Clothing piled on it. He brushed off the clothing and looked inside. Empty.

Checking this. Checking that. Checking. Rechecking. A sizzle of psychological electricity pulsed through each mini environment. The anticipation of violence dominated every thought, every movement exhilarating him, making him feel supercharged, more alive than he had ever felt. What was it? Controlled chaos? No, it wasn’t. It was planned. They were trained. Cover. Anticipate. What about the enemy? Put yourself in their shoes. What would they do? Was it out of place? Where would they hide?

Though disciplined and methodical, in each house entry, in each room clearing, Moose had a sensation of flying. His thoughts moved so fast he didn’t have enough time to stabilize his mind. Inside he was restless; outside, constant noise and commotion. A continuum of walls, and doors, and alleys, and halls, and windows, and floors, and stairwells, and furnishings, flowed around him, passed him. He was flying in it. There, but not there, looking for something but not really knowing what, everything different but everything the same, as if he were a pilot searching for something on the ground.

In a room with long rugs lining both walls, Moose panted. He took a knee. His ballistic goggles fogged, and he wiped them. A mouse darted across the floor ahead of him. He smiled. No bad guys, just a mouse.

Moose disconnected the hose to his camelbak canteen and took a long draw. He heard something on the radio about moving a vehicle.

Wolf One, Wynn leading, stood at the next house’s front door. Someone inside was opening it. Wynn stood to the left of the opening, Singleton to the right. Cengo and Randall stood a few feet back on either side of the entry steps. Wynn felt as if someone was peeling back the covering of his nerves.