car,' he said to Evan, 'in case you need 'em. You remember how we got here, right?' A joke, even in this setting. Nolan went right on. 'If you need to, hop in the driver's seat and get out any way you can. But this shouldn't be long. And, hey, remember, we're in black, but we're the good guys, for when we come out.'
Then he illuminated the light on the helmet he wore, as did the other men. All of these were clearly well- rehearsed maneuvers. At a nod from Nolan, the men broke into a trot toward their target. In an instant, one stood on each side of the door of the house. Nolan took a position in front of the door and, without any warning or fanfare, opened fire with his submachine gun. This knocked the door open and Nolan kicked it and led his men in.
Immediately, bedlam ensued. Screams and yelling, shots and sporadic bursts of automatic weapons fire, then the three men assembling outside again-Evan thinking it was already over-when the night was split by a shattering explosion out of the lower window. And the men rushed in again, this time into pure darkness.
Evan's knuckles tightened on the handles of his machine gun. Behind him, he heard a sound and whirled. He couldn't make the gun turn a full one-eighty, and he suddenly realized that if anyone were to come up behind him, he had no defense. Drawing his sidearm, he ducked down for a second below the backseat and peered back behind him, but there was nothing in the street. In the house across the way, the yelling and the gunfire continued-again individual shots followed by bursts of automatic weapons. Another explosion ripped through the night, this one blowing out the upstairs windows, and then suddenly all went quiet.
A few seconds later, the three men in black fatigues appeared outside the front door again. Two of them bolted back toward the car, while the third reentered the building, then emerged on a dead run just as his two colleagues got to the car. Behind him, in the house, two nearly simultaneous explosions blew out any remaining glass in the downstairs windows and halfway knocked him to the ground, but he kept running until he, too, reached the car.
By this time, Nolan was back in the driver's seat, breathing hard, starting the thing up. Over his shoulder, he yelled up at Evan. 'That was the place all right. That Ahmad is okay. Must have been a dozen Muj in there, dude, maybe two hundred AKs. RPGs, you name it. But nothing that a few frag grenades couldn't cure. God, I love this work. How 'bout you? Was that fun or what? Hang on, we're rolling.'
Behind him, fire and smoke were beginning to billow out of the building's windows. Evan couldn't take his eyes off the spectacle. He was vaguely aware of doors opening on the street around him, people pouring out into the night, more shouts, the screams of women. Behind them now, he heard the crack of what he imagined must be gunfire, but he saw nothing distinctly enough to consider it a target.
But then they had turned the corner and were headed back through the space in front of the mosque, then the marketplace. Evan swallowed against the dryness in his throat, his stomach knotted up inside him, his knuckles burning white on the handles of his machine gun.
8
A while after midnight, Evan tried to carefully and quietly navigate the three steps up to the dorm trailer. Between the news from home about Tara and his involvement in the raid, he figured he had every excuse in the world to split most of a bottle of Allstrong's Glenfiddich with Nolan after they returned to BIAP, and now the ground was shifting pretty well under him. He was looking forward to lying down on his cot. Tomorrow he'd try to process most or all of what he'd been through tonight, the aftermath.
He and his reservists had worked it out with the Filipino cooks and clerical staff and now had a dorm section of their own, eight cots in a double-wide bedroom. When he pushed open the door, the greeting was like a surprise party without anybody yelling surprise.
Suddenly all the lights went on, and these nearly blinded him, especially in his inebriated state. Stumbling backward against the brightness, his hands up in front of his eyes, he might have tripped on the steps and fallen back out of the trailer if one of his guys, Alan Reese, hadn't been waiting there to grab him.
As the glare faded, Evan blinked himself into some recognition. Facing him, some sitting on their cots, some standing, was his squadron. Marshawn Whitman, his sergeant and second-in-command, much to Evan's surprise, was standing at attention and even offered a legitimate salute before he began with a formality he'd never used before. 'Lieutenant,' he said, 'we all need to have a talk.'
Evan tried to focus so that he only saw one Marshawn, instead of two, looming there in front of him. He put a hand out against the doorjamb to hold himself steady. His tongue, too big for his mouth in any case, could only manage the word 'Now?'
'Now would be best,' Whitman said. 'We need to get out of here.'
'Where to?'
'Back to our unit.'
'Our unit? How we gonna do that?'
'We don't know, Lieutenant. But being here just isn't right.'
Evan, stalling for time, looked over first at Reese standing next to him, then around to Levy and Jefferson and Onofrio sitting forward on their cots, identical triplets-elbows on their thighs, hands clasped in front of them- and finally to Pisoni and Koshi and Fields, who were standing with their arms crossed, leaning against the wall. Whatever this was about, these guys were a unit, all of them in it together. And from the looks of them, all of them angry.
'Guys,' Evan said, 'it's not like we got a choice. They sent us here.'
'Well, not really. They sent us up to Baghdad, then we wound up here.'
'I'm not sure I see the difference, Marsh.'
Corporal Gene Pisoni, a sandy-haired, sweet-tempered mechanic for a Honda dealership in Burlingame, and the youngest member of the squad, cleared his throat. 'We could get shot at doing what we're doing here, is the difference, sir. They shot up this base today. We've just been lucky out in the streets up until now.'
Next to Evan, Reese piped in. 'The casualty figures posted today list a hundred and sixteen dead this last week in Baghdad alone. Our luck can't hold much longer.'
Lance Corporal Ben Levy, a law student at Santa Clara, added to the refrain. 'We've been here almost a month, sir. This was supposed to be a temporary assignment, wasn't it?'
Evan still felt the room swaying under him, but part of him was sobering up. 'Well, first, our luck can hold, guys, if we just stay careful. But I'm not arguing with you. This isn't what we got sent over here for, I agree. I just don't know what we can do about it.'
'Talk to Calliston.' Nao Koshi was Japanese-American, a software engineer who'd been pulled out of what he'd thought was the world's best job at Google. 'He assigned us here. He can assign us out.'
'We shouldn't be doing this.' A thick-necked Caltrans employee from Half Moon Bay, Anthony Onofrio was thirty-three years old. He had two young children and a pregnant wife at home. He was perennially the saddest guy in the group, but rarely spoke up to complain. Now, though, he continued. 'This really is all fucked up, sir. They've got to have the trucks we're trained to fix at least down in Kuwait by now. We ought to be down there doing what we're trained to do, not standing up behind machine guns.'
'I agree with you, Tony. You think I want to be here? But I thought you guys were happy to have regular quarters, regular meals.'
'The guys we came over with,' Marshawn said, 'they've probably got that by now, too, wherever they are. Maybe better than we got it here. We're all willing to risk it. Huh, guys?'
A general hum of affirmation went around the room.
'Bottom line, Ev,' Whitman continued, 'is what Tony said. Us going out in these packages every day is just bullshit. We don't want to die driving Jack Allstrong or Ron Nolan around to pick up money.'
'Nobody does, Marsh. I don't either.'
'Well, the way it's going now,' Whitman said, 'it's only a matter of time.'
Evan shook his head in an effort to clear it, then wiped a palm down the front of his face. 'You guys are right. I'm sorry. I'll talk to Calliston, see what I can do. At least get things moving, if I can.'
'Sooner would be better,' Pisoni said. 'I got a bad feeling about this. Things over here are heating up too fast. It's only going to get worse.'
'I'm on it, Gene,' Evan said. 'Promise. First chance I get. Tomorrow, if he's around.'
