Читать книгу Slim To None - Taylor Smith - Страница 11

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Iraq, the heart of the Sunni Triangle

The Brandywine team came out of the hills just after 1:00 a.m. There were four commandos with the forward unit that set out from the landing zone. They’d left the pilot and a base guard on backup at the LZ with the understanding that the chopper would pull back to a safer distance if there was any sign of enemy activity in the area. They had no desire to draw undue attention to their effort to extract the two Iraqi civilians from the insurgent-held town of Al Zawra.

Hannah was the lone woman in the advance group that headed down into the valley. Sean Ladwell, the team leader, was on point. Hannah and Marcus Wilcox were in the two and three positions, while OzNuñez was on rear guard. Nuñez, a former marine sniper, carried an M40A1 rifle, while the others had M-16s. In addition, each team member carried a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with sixteen rounds, half a dozen spare clips, plus a personalized assortment of backup guns, knives, fragmentation grenades and smoke bombs. Wilcox, a former NFL linebacker who’d quit pro ball on September 12, 2001, also had an M203 grenade launcher slung around his Kevlar’d torso. They were armed for bear but hoped to need none of it, slipping back to the LZ before sunup with their rescue targets in tow.

Four pairs of tan leather boots negotiated barren, rock-strewn terrain as they crept stealthily toward the target: the small market town of Al Zawra, population eight thousand, some fifty miles north of Baghdad. Four heads took constant, 360-degree readings of the terrain as they crept forward. Four pairs of eyes were fixed on the green-tinted shadows in their night-vision goggles, searching for any movement that would betray opposition forces. Hunting, too, for seemingly innocuous bumps in the terrain that could conceal improvised explosive devices.

The air, hot and arid, was laden with powder-fine grit. It was all Hannah could do not to sneeze inside the itching balaclava pulled over her head, nose and mouth, but she dared not make a sound that might announce their approach.

The caution was well warranted. They were coming in from the back side of the town that pressed up against the hills rather than via the main road off the Baghdad-to-Tikrit highway. Advance intel suggested that this flank was the most lightly guarded. The half-mile stretch of open ground between the foothills and their objective had also been aerial-surveyed with ground penetrating radar looking for land mines. Still, it paid to be ready for surprises. It could mean the difference between success and failure, life and death—or worse, capture. The gruesome images of recent hostage beheadings, flashed round the world via the Internet, were graphic reminders of the fate that could await them if they screwed up.

Hannah held her M-16 rifle clutched close to her body. Upon arrival at the first mission briefing at Brandywine International headquarters in Virginia a week earlier, she’d been greeted by wolf whistles and a few dubious propositions. Even though she’d been careful to show up wearing an old police academy sweatshirt, faded jeans and scuffed boots, her dark hair knotted behind her head and her makeup nonexistent, it had taken only a nanosecond for these clowns to jump to the conclusion that she was there to offer coffee, maps and maybe a hot-blooded romp to brave boys willing to risk their necks for a cause deemed worthy enough for a lucrative payday.

The kibitzing had faded fast, replaced by raised eyebrows and skeptical muttering when she was introduced and her role in the mission outlined. The grumbling hadn’t altogether died down since. They’d be happy to bed her, the grunts made clear, they just didn’t want to babysit her out here when their lives would be on the line.

Hannah informed them she didn’t need babysitting from anyone, thanks all the same. In any case, there was nothing they could do about her inclusion. It was a management call, and management had decided: she was in. She liked to think it wasn’t just because she spoke Arabic, but realistically, with even the team leader reluctant to have her along, she knew it probably was the tipping point. This mission—any mission in Iraq, these days—was risky enough. Without someone who spoke the local language, it could be impossible to pull off and maybe suicidal to boot.

Now, as they crept out of the hills, there was no distinguishing Hannah from the men, rigged out as she was in full paramilitary camouflage gear. She was on the tall side for a woman, five-eight in her bare feet, an inch more in her hiking boots. At least one of the men in the group was shorter, although Oz Nuñez was built like a Humvee, low, wide and solid. Hannah’s Kevlar body armor concealed a slender frame under her dark outerwear, while the balaclava and night-vision goggles obscured her long hair and deceptively delicate features.

Hannah’s fingerless leather gloves clutched the barrel and stock of her rifle. The gun was set to burst pattern, ready for any threat, but she projected outward calm as they crept toward their target. Only she knew that her heart was pounding against the khaki cotton T-shirt under her body armor, beating out the universal anthem of fatalists everywhere: When you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.

That about summed it up, she thought, as an itchy bead of sweat ran the rim of her goggles, then soaked into the lower part of the balaclava covering her nose and mouth. It was way too hot to be wearing complete covering, but they were going for anonymity and the intimidation factor here. Nothing said wet-your-pants scary like the Ninja warrior look.

The market town they were about to enter was under the thumb of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin, a militant anti-western Sunni warlord who’d managed to survive Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign of terror through sheer, Machiavellian bloody-mindedness, plus a close alliance with the dictator’s sadistic monster sons. Uday and Qusay Hussein had been killed in a shoot-out with U.S. forces the previous month. Saddam himself was on the run and his former soldiers had thrown away their uniforms, but all that meant was that there was no telling the players without a scorecard—and the scorecard kept getting rewritten. No matter how many times the administration back in Washington crowed “mission accomplished,” Iraq was descending into anarchy, with allegiances shifting daily.

Meantime, the ruthless Sheikh Salahuddin clung to control of his personal fiefdom. He was a force that would have to be reckoned with or eliminated, sooner or later, Hannah imagined, but as much trouble as the warlord was proving to be to coalition forces, the Brandy wine team hadn’t been sent to bring him down. Rather, its mission was to extract an old woman and her granddaughter living at the western edge of the town. It seemed like a lot of firepower for some granny and a kid, Hannah thought, but who was she to question orders?

Dawn was still a few hours off, but a searing wind stirred the fine sand that seemed to blanket the landscape. Hannah’s clenched jaws scraped grit over tooth enamel, while underneath the balaclava, the sweat on her cheeks and brow congealed into a gluey, sandpapery mud pack. Great. A dermabrasion facial, the repressed girlie-girl in her thought ruefully.

The group moved ahead stealthily, pausing now and again when Ladwell raised his hand. They pivoted, taking in every nuance of their surroundings. Even with night-vision goggles, it was a tough call to distinguish anything. The boulder-strewn, scrub-covered terrain was an abstract painter’s canvas of green, splotchy shadows. Whirlwinds of dust obscured the stars and the crescent moon overhead. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. The lack of light and definition, combined with their dusky camos and matte black weapons, would also render the team virtually invisible to any adversary. In theory, anyway.

If captured, they were hosed. No rescue would be mounted to save their sorry hides. Officially, they weren’t even here. They would not be counted among the dead, wounded and captured in this dirty little war where the enemy could be anyone from a Saddam fedayeen to an adolescent holy-martyr-wannabe body-wrapped in Semtex.

Despite the high risk, Hannah hadn’t hesitated to sign on for the mission. After all, if she bought it here, who would mourn? What family she had didn’t need her. Gabe would be the beneficiary of the hefty insurance policy that came with these contract jobs, so that if one day he wanted to escape the clutches of his father and the woman who was now his mom in all but name, he’d have the means to do it. As for Hannah’s police career, that had self-destructed, too, along with the rest of her once reasonably happy life.

Behind her were nothing but burned bridges. And when you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.