'San Carlos!' Nolan's voice thundered. 'I grew up right next door in Redwood City!' He slapped the bumper of the vehicle. 'You believe this small world, Lieutenant? This guy and me, we're neighbors back home.'
'We all are,' Evan said, sharing the enthusiasm although he couldn't exactly say why. 'Our unit's out of San Bruno. The nine of us, we're all Peninsula guys.'
'Son of a bitch!' Nolan crowed. 'I got hooked up with the right people here, that's for damn sure. How long have you guys been over here?'
'Going on three weeks,' Evan said.
'Get shot at yet?'
'Not yet.'
'Don't worry about it,' Nolan said with a grin, 'you will.'
For an obscure and possibly impenetrable reason, they got routed through the mixed neighborhood of Mansour by Haifa Street rather than through the military-only secure road they normally took when coming in to CPA headquarters from BIAP. Ron Nolan's destination was Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace in central Baghdad, and the line of traffic on Haifa waiting outside the checkpoint to get into the Green Zone-bumper to bumper with weapons off-safe, ready to react-stopped them cold. Nolan extricated himself from his seat and opened his door, stepping out into the street and stretching. Evan, loath to let his passenger out of his sight, overcame his own reluctance-Iraqi civilians were all over the street, any one of them possibly an armed insurgent- and got out as well.
It was late afternoon by now, sweltering hot with nary a freshening breeze. The air was heavy with the smells of roasting meat and fish, manure, oil, and garbage. Haifa Street was wide and lined with three-and four- story concrete buildings, most with at least some of their windows blown out. From the crowd on the sidewalks, including women and children, no one would conclude that they were in a war zone, though. Merchants had lined up where most of the traffic into the Green Zone had to pass, and the street had the air of a bazaar-makeshift stands sold everything from clothing to batteries, toilet paper to money to candy.
Nolan, taking it in, seemed to be enjoying it all. Finally, he caught Evan's eye and grinned over the hood of the car. 'We can make it in half the time if we walk. You up for it?'
Evan, reluctant to leave his troops, would have much preferred the relative security of his Humvee, but he also had a responsibility to protect Ron Nolan and get him back to Allstrong, and if that meant braving the streets of Baghdad, this was something different he should do as well. The mutually exclusive options played across his features.
Nolan noticed the hesitation. 'Come on, Lieutenant. No guts, no glory.'
'Just thinking about my men, Mr. Nolan,' Evan covered.
'Hey. If they get to the gate before we're done, have 'em pull over and we'll meet ' em there. But at this rate they won't even be there by the time we're through. And I'd like to make it back to BIAP before dark.'
Their Humvee moved forward about six feet and stopped again.
'Either way,' Nolan said, 'I'm going. You with me?'
'Sure.' Evan leaned inside the passenger window and told Marshawn what he was doing.
'I don't like being out of contact,' his driver replied.
'I don't either, Marsh. This is all new to me too.' He indicated their passenger with a toss of his chin. 'But he's going. And things here look pretty calm.'
'Yeah,' Marshawn said, 'the 'before' shot.'
They both knew that he meant 'before the bomb exploded in the crowded marketplace.'
'Let's hope not,' Evan said. 'And the sooner we get done and leave Baghdad, the sooner we're back home.'
'I'm not arguing, sir. If you got to go, you got to go. But what if you're not at the gate? What are we supposed to do? Where will you be?'
For an answer, Evan shrugged and held up his portable Motorola radio, which was good for about a mile. Nolan, who'd heard the exchange, leaned back to Marshawn. 'Budget office, down in the basement of the headquarters building. You can't miss it. But a hundred bucks says we beat you back to the gate.'
The traffic gave and Marshawn crept forward another five or six feet before stopping again. The line of cars stretched for at least a quarter mile in front of him. 'That's a bad bet for me, sir,' he said, 'even if I had the hundred bucks.'
'I think so, too, Sergeant. That's why we're walking.' Nolan snapped his fingers, remembering something, and reopened his back door. Reaching in, he emerged a second later with his backpack, apparently empty. 'Can't forget this,' he said with another grin, and strapped it onto his back, over the Kevlar vest.
Ron Nolan waited for Evan to fall in next to him, then said, 'And by the way, my name's Ron, okay? Mr. Nolan's my dad. You okay with Evan?'
'That's my name.'
'Yeah, well, Evan, I didn't mean to put you on the spot back there with your men, and I apologize. But you can't afford to be tentative here. You've got to make decisions and run on 'em. That's the main thing about this place.'
'I just made my decision. But I'm not sure that leaving my convoy was the right one. We've had it drilled into us that procedures are crucial to maintain order.'
They were walking shoulder to shoulder at the curb. Nolan shook his head, disagreeing. 'My experience says it's more important to trust your gut. And I'm not talking just about deciding in a split second who's a Muj and who's a Hajj'-these were the Mujahideen and the Hajji, the bad guys and the good guys, respectively-'which is life and death and I mean right now. But the business environment here…Christ, what a gold mine! But you've got to see the opportunity and jump, and I'm talking like yesterday, or it all goes away. Did you get a chance to talk to Jack Allstrong at all back at BIAP?'
'A little bit.'
'He tell you how he got the airport gig? The one that got us on the boards?'
'No. He never mentioned it.'
'Well, it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. You know what our half of that contract's worth? If you guess sixteen million dollars, you're on it.'
'To do what? I saw the trailers, but it wasn't clear what you guys were doing there.'
'We're guarding the airport, that's what.'
'What about us?'
'What do you mean, us?'
'I mean the military, the Army, the Marines. What about us? We're not guarding the airport?'
'No. You're fighting the insurgents-most of the regular units, anyway. Jerry Bremer, God love him, in his wisdom fired all the Iraqi police and disbanded the military, so nobody's left over here except us contractors to provide security for the people who are coming in droves to do oversight and infrastructure, which is, like, everybody else.'
Evan had his hand on the weapon in the holster on his hip. Most of the local people in the street and on the sidewalk were simply stepping out of the way as the two Americans passed by, but many of the children were smiling and jogging along with them-Evan had already learned, along with the Iraqi kids, that U.S. servicemen were a common source of candy from their MRE kits. But Evan had no candy on him and he wanted to get inside the Green Zone as fast as he could, so he kept pressing through the crowd.
Meanwhile, Ron Nolan kept up the patter. 'Jack really hadn't been doing too good after he cashiered out. He'd been trying to set up a security business in San Fran, looking into water supply issues and the whole domestic terrorist thing, but it wasn't going very well. So then Baghdad falls, and what did Jack do? Same thing as Mike Battles with Custer Battles. He hopped on a plane with his last couple hundred bucks and flew over here to suss the place out for business opportunities.' Nolan spread his arms theatrically. '
'Just like that?'
