Betrayal

'Oh, and sir,' Whitman added. 'It might be better, when you get to see Calliston, if you were sober. He'll take the request more seriously. No offense.'

'No,' Evan said. 'Of course. None taken. You guys are right.'

As it turned out, Colonel Calliston did not have a free seventeen seconds, much less fifteen minutes, that he felt obligated to devote to the problems of a reserve lieutenant whose squadron was gainfully employed doing meaningful work for one of the CPA's major contractors. Finally, Evan took the guys' beef to Nolan, who listened with apparent sympathy to the men's position and promised to bring the matter up with Allstrong, who in turn would try to make a pitch to Calliston. But, like everything else in Iraq, it was going to be a time-consuming, lengthy process that might never show results anyway. Nolan suggested that, in the meanwhile, Evan's squadron might want to write to the commander of their reserve unit, or to some of their colleagues in that unit, wherever they happened to be in the war theater.

In the few days while these discussions and negotiations were transpiring, things in Baghdad -bad enough to begin with-became substantially worse, especially for the convoys. One of the KBR convoys delivering several tons of dinars in cash from Baghdad to BIAP was ambushed just outside of the city and barely limped into the compound with one dead and four wounded. The lead vehicle's passenger-side window was blown out, and the doors and bumpers sported dozens of bullet holes. The attack had been a coordinated effort between a suicide-vehicle-borne explosive device-an SV-BED-and insurgents firing from rooftops. The consensus was that the damage could have been much worse, but the Marines in the convoy had shot up the suicide vehicle and killed its driver before he had gotten close enough to do more significant damage.

Earlier in the week, another convoy manned by DynaCorp contract personnel had shot out the windshield of the Humvee carrying the Canadian ambassador as a passenger, when his car hadn't responded to a warning to stay back. Luckily, in that incident, because the contractors had used rubber bullets, no one was badly hurt. But nerves were frayed everywhere, tempers short, traffic still insanely dense.

By now, most of the routes in and out of the city had been barricaded off and access to those thoroughfares was nominally under the control of the CPA and Iraqi police/military units. All vehicles had to pass at least one and often several checkpoints to be admitted to these streets. Unfortunately, the inner city was a cobweb of smaller streets that fed into the larger main roads, and access to these was much more difficult to control. A convoy like Scholler's would be sitting in traffic downtown, essentially stationary, and a car with four Iraqis in it would suddenly appear out of one of these alleys and begin crowding the convoys in the slowly moving endless line of traffic.

Since many of these cars were in fact SV-BEDs, they, too, ignored escalation of the hand and audio signals in their efforts to get close enough to destroy the convoys they'd targeted. And of course, in these cases, the machine gunners standing through the roofs of the Humvees in the convoys had little option, if they wanted to save their own lives, but to open fire on the approaching vehicle.

Tragically, though, all too often the approaching car held innocent Arabic-speaking Iraqi civilians who simply didn't understand the English commands to back off, or the simple Arabic commands soldiers had been taught to give to help with the confusion. Or they failed to appreciate the urgency of the hand signals. In the first months after the occupation of Baghdad, these shooting 'mistakes' had come to account for ninety-seven percent of the civilian deaths in the city-far more than the deaths caused by all the insurgents, IEDs, sniper fire, and suicide bombers combined. If a car got too close to a convoy, it was going to get shot up. That was the reality.

Nolan, scheduled for the rear car this Tuesday with Evan, picked right up on the bad vibe that had been riding along with Scholler's squadron for the past few days. Now, as he walked up to the convoy, he was somewhat surprised to see Evan outside his vehicle, having some words with one of his men, Greg Fields. Tony Onofrio, another of the guys, was standing by listening, obviously uncomfortable.

'Because I say so,' Evan was saying, 'that's why.'

'That ain't cutting it, Lieutenant. I've been up there three days in a row. How about we put Tony on the gun today?' Fields was obviously talking about the machine gunner's spot, the main target popping out of the roof of their Humvee.

'Tony's a better driver than you are, Greg, and you're better on the gun, so that's not happening. Mount up.'

But Fields didn't move.

Nolan had been aware that the unit's respect for Evan's leadership had declined over their recreational drinking coupled with Evan's inability to get them transferred, and now it looked as though Fields might flatly refuse his lieutenant's direct order. So he stepped into the fray. 'Hey, hey, guys. No sweat. I'll take the gun. Greg, you hop in the back seat and chill a while.'

Nolan knew that the men might also be mad about his own role in Evan's drinking, plus driving him all over to hell and gone, but figured that neither as a group nor individually could they resent him if he took a turn in the roof. Although this was technically forbidden.

Caught in the middle, Evan felt that he had to assert his authority. 'I can't let you do that, Ron.'

'Sure you can.' He gestured toward the machine gun. 'I'm a master on that mother.'

'I'm sure you are,' Evan said, 'but you're only allowed to use a sidearm.'

Flashing the smile he used to disarm, Nolan stepped up and whispered into Evan's face. 'Dude, the other night ring a bell? That's not your rule. That's the recommendation for contractors. Nothing to do with you. I'm betting Fields has no objection.' He turned. 'That right, son?'

The young man didn't hesitate for an instant. 'Absolutely.'

'Fields isn't the issue,' Evan said, even as the guys from the other Humvees were moving down in their direction, wondering what the beef was about.

'I'm the issue to me, Lieutenant,' Fields said. 'It ain't right, me being up there every day. If Mr. Nolan wants a turn, I say tell him thanks and let's roll out of here.'

Evan didn't want this to escalate in front of his other men. Nolan was throwing him a lifeline that could save his authority and preserve some respect in front of his squad. And maybe what he said was true. Maybe it was a rule for contractors, and none of the Army's business.

'All right,' Evan said at last, lifting a finger at Fields. 'This one time, Greg.'

Now Evan and his very disgruntled guys were in a Baghdad neighborhood called Masbah, where Nolan was to meet up and conduct some business with a tribal chief who was a friend of Kuvan. They'd already passed the checkpoint into the wide main thoroughfare that was now choked with traffic. On either side, storefronts gave way to tall buildings. Pedestrians skirted sidewalk vendors who spilled over into the roadway on both sides of the road.

But in contrast to many of their other trips through the city, today they'd encountered quite a bit of low-level hostility. Kids who, even a week before, had run along beside the convoy begging for candy, today hung back and in a few cases pelted the cars with rocks and invective as they drove by. Older 'kids,' indistinguishable in many ways from the armed and very dangerous enemy, tended to gather in small groups and watch the passage of the cars in surly silence. The large and ever-growing civilian death toll from quick-triggered convoy machine gunners-in Evan's view, often justifiable, if tragic-was infecting the general populace. And in a tribal society such as Iraq 's, where the death of a family member must be avenged by the whole tribe, Evan felt that at any time the concentric circles of retribution might extend to them-all politics and military exigencies aside.

Riding along with Nolan on the big gun above him, Evan was more than nervous. He honestly didn't know his duty. He hadn't been briefed on this exact situation and had no ranking officer above him to tell him the rules. Should he have stood up to Nolan and forbade him to man the machine gun, alienating himself from his men even more? Could he just continue to let him ride up there and hope the problem would go away? But playing into all of his ruminations was the fact that since the unauthorized raid into the BIAP neighborhood, everything about Nolan had him on edge.

The more Evan reflected on it, the less defensible that attack seemed, the more like some variant of murder. Evan had been a cop long enough in civilian life that he was sensitive to the nuances of homicide, and the raid had