“That bad, huh?”
“Even worse, Captain.” Fahd handed Jackson the cigarettes. “Have another Dunhill. I’ll round them up.”
TEN MINUTES LATER Fahd was back, four men in tow.
“As you like, Captain.” An Iraqi expression that meant: Whenever you’re ready.
Jackson looked at his watch. Eight-forty. Saleh had said the meeting was supposed to start at nine and last an hour. But he’d also warned Jackson that the guerrillas often ran late. And Jackson knew he couldn’t risk watching the barbershop — any American presence would be obvious. He had decided to hit at nine forty-five and hope for the best.
“We have a little while. Where’s your flak jacket, Colonel?”
“I don’t have one.”
“We gave you enough armor for every officer in Khudra.” Jackson didn’t hide the frustration in his voice.
A brittle laugh escaped Fahd’s lips. “Let me tell you a story.” He lit a fresh cigarette. “It will be over before this Dunhill.”
“Sure.”
“My father owned a store in Sadr City. You know Sadr City, of course.”
“Of course.” Sadr City was a giant slum in northeast Baghdad, on the other side of the Tigris River, a desperately poor place.
“We were not wealthy. No one in Sadr City is wealthy. But we were comfortable,” Fahd said. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Unfortunately my father — Mohammed — liked to joke. Sometimes he joked about Saddam. In 1987, the Mukhabarat”—Saddam’s secret police—“raided his store. They took him and my brother Sadiq to Abu Ghraib. You can guess the rest.”
“Did you ever see them again?”
“Sadiq survived, for a while. He died two years later.”
“Did he tell you what had happened?”
“He never spoke after they let him go.”
“He never said what they’d done?”
“He never spoke at all.” Fahd pointed at his mouth. “No tongue.”
Jackson felt his own tongue curl inside his mouth as he tried to think of something to say.
“I’m sorry.”
“They must have found a very bad Mukhabarat agent,” Fahd said. “My father’s jokes weren’t so much.”
“And you escaped?”
“I wasn’t there. They never came back for me. I don’t know why. Maybe they felt — what is the word? — lazy.”
“So you don’t wear body armor,” Jackson said.
“If Allah wishes me to stay alive, I will. And if he wishes me to see my father again, I will. Either way I will be grateful for his blessings.”
LED BY J.C.’S armored Humvee, the Mad Dog convoy rolled north on Dodge, a broad avenue that stretched through the center of Ghazalia. Bomb holes pitted the road. Patrols here got hit almost every night, though no soldiers had been killed. Yet.
With the streets empty, they had the road almost to themselves. The patrol stretched a half mile nose to tail, with Fahd’s Land Rover nestled in the middle, a toy among the Bradleys and tanks.
Through J.C.’s night-vision goggles the world glowed yellow and black. Looming over a field to the east was the Mother of All Battles mosque, a concrete monstrosity with minarets designed to resemble machine gun turrets. Saddam had built the mosque to celebrate his decade-long war with Iran, which had left two million people dead. When the electricity was running, the minarets glowed infernally in the night. But tonight the power was out. The mosque and the neighborhood had gone dark, though generators provided power to a few fortunate houses. The blackout was a good break, and so was the new moon. The darker the night, the better the goggles worked.
A tracer round cut through the night, a single shot as the patrol passed by. They’re out there, J.C. thought. Watching us. Waiting for us to make a mistake. Good. Let ’em. His finger crawled around the trigger of his.50- cal.
The Humvee halted as the convoy reached the northern end of the Ghazalia road, where a narrow bridge ran into Shula, a crowded slum. The patrol has to look routine, Jackson had told the Mad Dogs. They can’t know we’re coming. The convoy made a slow U-turn and headed south.
IN THE NARROW back room of the barbershop in Ghazalia, officially known as Al-Jakra for Hair Cutting and Shampooing, Farouk Khan perched uncomfortably on a cheap blue couch. Boxes of old shampoo bottles lay on the floor, and three AK-47s had been left carelessly under a staircase by the back wall. A noisy generator in the corner powered an overhead bulb and a hot plate boiling water for tea. He looked again at his watch. Nine-twenty. Why hadn’t they arrived? Farouk was not a coward; cowards did not last long as nuclear spies. Still, he hated pointless risks.
The door opened, but it was just Zayd, the skinny Iraqi who had guided Farouk from Islamabad to Baghdad. Farouk was thoroughly sick of Zayd. The Iraqi’s manners were atrocious. He spat and picked his nose with abandon, and he never washed. Plus, Farouk didn’t trust anyone so thin. Eating was a great pleasure; who would forsake it? But Farouk had to admit that Zayd had come in handy. He spoke Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, and English. In fact, Farouk hadn’t yet heard a language that Zayd didn’t understand. And he knew half the tribal leaders between here and Pakistan. So Farouk had accepted the man’s medieval personal habits.
“Funny, isn’t it, Zayd,” Farouk said. “It’s easy to tell the wealth of a country from a hospital or a supermarket. But barbershops look the same wherever I’ve been. Here, Pakistan, Europe. Black swivel chairs, counters crowded with mysterious glass jars, posters of young men with close-cropped hair.”
“Umm.” Zayd put a knuckle into his nose. Farouk wondered whether the gesture was meant as an answer. For a man of so many tongues, Zayd said surprisingly little. Perhaps great conversations went on inside his head.
Farouk settled back in the couch, feeling it creak under his bulk. Outside he could hear the heavy low rumbling of American tanks in the distance. He jiggled the Geiger counter in his lap and tried to control his nervousness. “Will they be here soon, Zayd?” His companion merely shrugged and poured two glasses of tea, dropping in sugar with his dirty fingers. Farouk grimaced and drank. Then he heard the cars pull up.
CAPTAIN JACKSON’S PLAN was simple. The barbershop sat on the western edge of Ghazalia. When his convoy reached the street that ran to the shop, the Humvees and Land Rover would peel off and race west. The tanks and Bradleys would follow. With any luck the guerrillas wouldn’t realize what was happening until the Humvees had already reached the shop. The heavier armor would establish a perimeter when it arrived.
The strategy had risks. Jackson had fifteen soldiers in the Humvees, along with the five Iraqi officers in the Rover. They should be able to take out four guerrillas. But if the shop had been fortified, they could be in for a fight. Especially before the Bradleys arrived with reinforcements. Normally, Jackson would put his heaviest firepower at the front and keep the lighter vehicles in the rear, but this time he could not risk alerting his targets.
Even after his men got inside the store, their problems would not be over. Jackson didn’t know the layout of the shop, or even whether it had a second exit. His patrols had cruised by the store twice in the last three days, but he had feared more recon might spook the target. Still, he had no doubt his men could pull off the mission. They’d been through worse.
Jackson looked through his armored window at the deserted storefronts. Time to give the bosses one last chance to chicken out. He picked up his battalion radio and called the Tactical Operations Center at Camp Graphite.
