Weapons of Mass Destruction (22 page)

Sorting out civilians and combatants had been much more straightforward the first few days of the operation. The groups were smaller, usually just a mother and her children. Occasionally a father showed up. Determining whether he was armed with malicious intent could get tricky. Using families as camouflage to move from one position to another was standard practice. Desperate men deployed more desperate measures. In Ramadi Sinclair’s platoon had confronted an insurgent grasping his daughter in one arm, a pistol in the other. Sinclair managed to pick him off without harming the girl. Overcome with grief, she threw herself on her father’s body, oblivious to the fact that he had just used her as a human shield.

“Blood is thicker than water,” Wolf had said, prying the girl loose so they could search the corpse.

“Tell her father that,” Sinclair said.

He grabbed one of her wrists but she twisted free. Logan rushed over. It took three of them to restrain her.

“The prick.”

Untold numbers of families risked their lives to remain in the combat zones they called home. Born and bred with the taste of war on their lips, they had grown accustomed to its bitterness. Perhaps filial devotion and patriotism were more closely aligned in the Middle East than in the West. At every turn, cultural differences seemed to favor the cause of the insurgency. Winning wars against armies was one thing. Fighting the combined forces of religion, regimes, and kinship ties was far more daunting. Americans had superior military might on their side. The question was whether weapons alone could prevail over so many convictions so deeply rooted in the marrow of the land.

A burqa appeared in the window of a posh three-story residence. A minute later a woman emerged from the back door, five kids and a teenage boy in tow. Her clothing was far more modest than the house. Sinclair assumed she was either a servant or just passing through the neighborhood in search of increasingly elusive asylum. The children’s heads were bowed, as though their safety depended on keeping their gazes glued to the ground. Only the teenager’s eyes wandered, almost imperceptibly. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a sign of either Western influence or a disguise masking his militancy. The only certainty was that he walked suspiciously close to the woman. The others were young enough to want to cling to her. But older boys usually kept their distance, asserting a modicum of independence even in kill zones. Sinclair zoomed in, looking for concealed weapons.

“Heads-up,” Sinclair reported into his headset.

“Location?”

“Crossing the courtyard.”

“That woman and her kids?” Radetzky demanded.

“Could be a decoy.”

“Got that, Wolf?”

“Roger that.”

Wolf’s squad was clearing a house just east of the civilian incursion. Gunners immediately manned the windows facing the courtyard. Sinclair could see that their angles were blocked by an old olive tree. Furtive patches of shade dodged Fallujah’s relentless sun. Radetzky’s team exited the neighboring compound, covering him as he shouted in Arabic.

“Stop right there. Put your hands up.”

The woman raised her arms in the air. Everything about her seemed to signal innocence. The teenage boy stood behind her, just beyond the perimeter of shade. Only Sinclair had a decent view of him. Something glinted. It might have been a belt buckle. No one in the squad noticed. They were wary but not alarmed, relying too heavily on Sinclair’s cover.

“That goes for your kids, too,” Radetzky said. “Tell them to raise their hands over their heads.”

The teenager took a small step to his left, compromising Sinclair’s sight line. Fortunately he was considerably taller than the woman, whose voluminous burqa all but obscured his torso. Something glinted again, and the barrel of a rifle poked out. The only possible target was the boy’s head. Sinclair squeezed the trigger, and the woman fell to the ground.

“What the fuck—”

A single shot had been fired, a bull’s-eye. The head exploded, spraying the woman and her children with gore. Sinclair told himself she couldn’t possibly have been wounded. He zeroed in on her face. Her eyes were closed. He scoped her chest, which rose and fell with each labored breath. She must have fainted.

“Hold your ground,” Radetzky ordered.

No one made a move to succor the woman. She lay dazed until the cries of the other children roused her. Radetzky’s squad kept their automatics at the ready as she tried to comfort them. Women were often used as bait in ambushes, even when they weren’t complicit. Sinclair surveyed the entire neighborhood. Another platoon was engaged in a firefight several blocks west. There were no threats in the immediate vicinity.

“All clear,” Sinclair confirmed.

The woman rose and led her brood away from the decapitated corpse. The youngest was still crying. The rest had resumed their guarded expressions, eyes trained on their feet. The self-possession of children in Iraq amazed Sinclair. Even toddlers comported themselves with preternatural calm. They made him wonder whether immaturity was more a performance than a state of mind, something kids staged to attract attention. Not that he begrudged them their little indulgences. Childhood wasn’t just a luxury. It was a basic human right, another casualty of war.

The woman was picking bits of flesh out of their hair. She wiped their faces with tissues extracted one-by-one from a miniature Kleenex dispenser. There was something surreal about the sight of an American brand name amidst the carnage, a product specifically marketed to carry in purses, just in case. Judging from her impassive expression, she might have been blowing their noses. She was meticulous. Each bloody Kleenex disappeared into a pocket concealed in her robe, a deep-seated habit to avoid littering. If she had been complicit with the dead boy, she was hard-boiled. She would have made a perfect spy.

“Trapp,” Radetzky barked.

“Sir.”

“Take them back to the cleared compound.”

“Yessir.”

Radetzky’s squad was long overdue for a catnap. In the meantime, Captain Phipps granted permission to interrogate the woman. Radetzky ordered Sinclair to cover the area until Wolf could spare a couple of gunners to pull guard duty. Wolf took his sweet time. They had encountered resistance in an adjacent alleyway. It was almost predictable. The minute civilians showed up, the fighting escalated. Sinclair hated to think that innocent bystanders were being used as decoys. But it was the lesser of two evils. The only other explanation was that there was no such thing as innocent bystanders in Fallujah.

A half hour crawled by before relief showed up. Sinclair kept scoping possible targets, trying to keep busy to stay awake. The last thing he wanted to do before a coveted catnap was take another Provigil. He watched a pack of dogs slink down the alleyway. One of them raised its snout and caught the scent of his last kill. He stopped watching when they started nosing around the headless corpse. Finally he lost the battle and popped a pill. There’d be hell to pay if he couldn’t sleep when he joined the squad in the compound below.

When he finally descended from his perch, Sinclair made the mistake of walking past Radetzky’s command center. He could have easily avoided it. Radetzky never failed to colonize the kitchen. Other lieutenants preferred the study, if there was one, or the living room. The kitchen must have been the command center of Radetzky’s home growing up. Johnson was leaning against the refrigerator, filing a report with Fox News. Radetzky was on the radio with Colonel Denning, confirming grid coordinates. The woman was sitting with her hands folded on a checkered tablecloth.

Sinclair was surprised she was still there. Radetzky disliked civilian interrogations. He usually got them out of the way as quickly as possible so he could get back to the business of waging war. They must have let her wash up first. Her robe was covered with wet circles where she’d scrubbed out the blood. Otherwise there was no evidence of the shooting. A kettle steamed on the stove. A full cup of tea sat, untouched, in front of her on the table.

She pretended not to notice Sinclair or anyone else. She looked at her hands the way her children had looked at their feet, as though she might escape notice if she kept to herself. Sinclair wondered if she knew that he was the one who killed the teenager. Her son. Whoever the hell it was. Her composure certainly didn’t rule out the possibility. An untrained eye might have mistaken it for detachment. Sinclair knew better. He had witnessed countless Iraqi civilians, mostly women, with that same distant expression. Burqas hid very little once you learned their body language. They tended to focus rather than mask emotions.

Sinclair grabbed an MRE before going upstairs to crash. He stood, gazing out the window, while he ate. He could feel the woman staring at his back even though he knew she was still watching her hands. Iraqi women had learned to compensate for Sharia law against making eye contact with men. They could stare you down without even looking at you. She reminded him of the mother of the shepherd boy they had gunned down near Mosul. They had the same mute ferocity.

His squad had been ordered to seize an airstrip. They were told in no uncertain terms that the area was crawling with hostile forces. It was high noon, so hot the desert horizon shimmered the way it does in old movies. Even the requisite camels were there, silhouetted against the glare. Then somebody fired the first shot. Camels flew one way, enemy combatants with rifles the other. The squad let loose, mowing down everything in sight. Only they weren’t enemy combatants with guns. They were shepherds with staffs, teenagers and their little brothers. And they were all dead except one. His mother was by his side almost before the storm of bullets subsided.

“Shit!”

“Is she armed?”

“Where’s the medic?”

They had just shot and almost killed her son, who had provoked them with nothing more than a herding stick. She turned to them, supporting the boy in her arms, without a trace of malice. All that mattered was saving his life, and only the soldiers responsible for his wounds could dress them. She didn’t humble herself. Her speechless supplication bristled with the power of mothers protecting their young. Rules of engagement notwithstanding, they suspended combat operations to treat the boy. She never thanked them, never even really saw them. The desert was filled with nameless, faceless threats. They were all the same to her.

It was an unfortunate incident, the most ill-advised attack during their first tour of duty. But they knew better than to second-guess their impulse to defend themselves. If nations agreed to let gladiators decide the outcome of political conflicts, collateral damage could be avoided. Until then soldiers who served honorably were blameless, even heroic. Commanding officers were adamant on this point. Teaching men to kill without remorse was almost as important as teaching them to kill in the first place.

“As long as you follow orders, you’ll never be guilty of war crimes.”

Whenever shit hit the fan, Sergeant Troy’s voice came to the rescue, providing the ethical armor necessary to survive in Iraq. Too bad he never told them how to defend themselves against women. Not that they posed a direct threat. But if there were chinks in Sinclair’s armor, he knew damned good and well how they got there. Something about the woman in the kitchen got under his skin even more than the mother on that godforsaken airstrip. It might have been nothing more than proximity, the fact that he could reach out and touch her. House-to-house combat was claustrophobic enough without this shit.

Sinclair finished bolting down his food. He threw the empty containers in the garbage and prepared to leave the kitchen. But something about the woman held him captive. Whether or not she was the dead boy’s mother didn’t alter the fact that he’d been carrying a German Mauser. The more important question was whether she knew he was armed. Johnson was apparently interested enough to forgo sleep to find out. He had finished filing his report and was sitting with his back against the refrigerator, waiting for the interrogation to begin. Sinclair sat down next to him. Johnson’s curiosity, which was purely professional, made Sinclair’s seem less inappropriately personal.

“Think she was in on it?” Sinclair asked.

“I doubt it,” Johnson said.

“They’re all in on it as far as I’m concerned.” Sinclair wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but somehow it made him feel better. “Otherwise why would they be here?”

Sajad was taking down the woman’s vital statistics. Then Radetzky started conducting the actual interrogation. His knowledge of Arabic was good enough to carry on rudimentary conversations. He must have thought the woman could provide more nuanced intelligence, things he couldn’t comprehend without the help of an interpreter. The fact that her children were in custody provided the kind of leverage Radetzky needed to tighten the screws, if necessary. He spoke in a disarmingly gentle voice, one Sinclair had never heard him use before. Her responses, though barely audible, were remarkably forthright.

“I’m Lieutenant Radetzky. Please tell me your name.”

“Afaf Pachachi.”

“Why are you still here?”

“They told me you wanted to talk to me.”

“I mean here in Fallujah.”

“I live here.”

“Where exactly?”

“In the Jolan District. Our house was bombed.”

“What are you doing in this neighborhood?” Radetzky leaned forward. He was obviously modifying his body language in response to the tone and tenor of Afaf Pachachi’s answers. Successful interrogations were a kind of dance, a movement back and forth between civility and coercion, especially when women were involved. If Sinclair had been in charge, there would have been far less give and take. He would have relied more on intimidation than trust, overcompensating in self-defense. Radetzky’s sangfroid was instructive.

“We’ve been taking shelter wherever we can.”

“You were told to evacuate.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“My husband—”

“What about your husband?”

“He’s my husband. I belong by his side.”

Sinclair could have predicted her answers, almost word for word. He had heard dozens of women profess what amounted to marriage vows, loyalty till death do us part. The real issue was whether this was an exclusively matrimonial allegiance. Too often, sacred laws shielding women from public life didn’t prevent their participation in guerrilla warfare. Sinclair scooted across the floor to get a clear view of Afaf Pachachi’s face. He studied her eyes for signs of subterfuge. No doubt Radetzky was doing the same.