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  As the pilots file out grumbling, Colbert motions for Jesse to stay. When they are alone, he pulls up a tactical map, “I just talked to Busted Flush by sat. We’re going in somewhere around here. By Samarra.”

  Jesse studies the map. “Who we hauling?”

  Colbert waffles an open palm. “Sounds like a cop thing. You’ll fly in empty. If it’s a bust, you haul out the prisoners.”

  “Iraqi cops?” Jesse looks dubious. “Okay, just as long as they load their rifles after they get off the aircraft . . .”

  “C’mon, these are special cops; they got an American with them. Guns are laid on as a precaution because of the mission status.” He taps the map. “They won’t give us an exact location until we’re in the air.”

  “So where are they?” Jesse wonders.

  “Catching a hop in from Washington.” Meaning the Green Zone. “They’ll meet us on the flight line. That’s it. Get your crew briefed.”

  Back out in the sun, Jesse admits to a slightly elevated pulse—spooks, code names, and all. Usually the missions are daylong milk runs—a minimum of two Hawks flying mutual support, ferrying troops and civilians from one forward base to another. Jesse lives in an American bubble, on the base or in the air. This could be different.

  Chapter Eight

  At 4 a.m. the veil of blowing sand dissolves into a crisp predawn stacked with twinkling stars. After sleeping in the Suburban’s front seat, Morgon breakfasts on a thermos of strong Iraqi coffee and a Camel straight as Ahmed drives through the darkened outskirts of Samarra. The two escort cars with the security men stay behind. Now they rendezvous with a battered Toyota pickup packed with tribal militia armed with AK-47 rifles and RPG grenade launchers. Morgon glances at Ahmed hunched over the steering wheel and his cell phone. For the next two or three hours they are on their own.

  Like Ahmed, Morgon now wears a loosely fitted tan dishdasha pulled over his Kevlar. His face hides in a checkered kaffiyeh headscarf secured by a plaited cord.

  Under a pale sickle moon they race west through a hardscrabble warren of villages, then slow and stop as a flush of blue-pink washes the eastern horizon. Morgon smells pungent, sluggish water. The roadbed creaks. They cross the spidery superstructure of a rickety, cantilevered bridge.

  “Don’t worry. It was built to handle heavy armor,” Ahmed assures him when they halt on the far side. “We wait here ’til we can see.”

  Morgon takes advantage of the break to get out, stretch his legs, and look over the bridge that spans a 50-yard-wide canal with sides heaped in steep sand berms. Shadowy groves of date palms line the tops of the twin embankments.

  Ahmed gets out, hugging his shoulders. “Cold, huh?” His words eject little white puffs in the chilly air.

  A little past 5 a.m. the top of the sun pokes up in the east, and for a moment the blaze coexists with deep blue-lavender shadow. Then Morgon feels the tingle of sunrise on his cheek and watches it slowly uncover a jumble of muddy red brick ramparts, narrow passages, and collapsed stairways. The ruins cover an area roughly the size of two football fields, and now that the sun has cleared the horizon, they merge into a switchback maze of light and shadow that resembles the wreckage of an M.C. Escher Babylonian labyrinth.

  Noland’s work site is two hundred yards beyond the ruins, where piles of cinder block, corrugated steel, and scraps of twisted cyclone fence litter the desolation. Several men stand next to a truck, stamping their feet to keep warm. There’s a shed, a dumpster on a lowboy, an old Land Rover, and a six-axle cement mixer, with the drum turning.

  “I’d send a couple guys to sweep through this brickyard, to make sure we don’t have company,” Morgon suggests. Ahmed barks an order in Arabic. Four of the tribals unsling their rifles and pad silently into the ruins.

  Slowly the dawn creeps over the flat hardpan and uncovers a fragment of mud brick wall jutting up midway between the edge of the ruins and the work site. Like somebody could have built it last week. Or two thousand years ago, Morgon reflects. It’s the dry climate. Out here you can’t tell.

  Half an hour later the scouts report back: all clear. Ahmed talks on his walkie-talkie to the men guarding the site. Then, after he posts six men to watch the bridge, he decides it’s safe to proceed through the ruins.

  Pulling up to the parked truck, Morgon shoots a glance at Ahmed. The truck is full of rusty artillery rounds.

  “Don’t worry,” Ahmed says. “Like I said, we had to sort the cache. This is regular high explosive. We come across a lot of it in the construction business. We’ll turn it in, say we found it on another work site.”

  Raising his eyebrows, Morgon indicates the welder’s rig sitting next to the truck, twin tanks of oxygen and acetylene on a dolly.

  Ahmed shrugs and points past the truck, at two broad ground cloths stretched on crosspoles over what appears to be a long trench. “We welded rebar in the excavation, to elevate the chemical rounds. So we could pour under them to make it tight all around.”

  As the workers pull back the tarps, Ahmed leans over and pops the glove compartment that contains a 9mm Beretta and a magazine. He looks at Morgon once, expressionless, then nods toward the tool shed. Then he exits the truck and walks over to the trench to watch the cement-truck workers unlimber the chute.

  Morgon removes the pistol and tests the top round against the magazine spring with his thumb. Then he inserts the magazine, pulls the slide, releases it, and sets the safety. Out of the truck, he tucks the weapon in the belt that gathers his tunic as Ahmed motions him over to the pit.

  “See,” he points, ”we didn’t make this up.”

  Like a crop of dragon’s teeth growing in concrete, the rows of artillery shells are buried up to their nose cones so only the death’s-head stencils on the tips are visible. One of the shells lays horizontal and has been dismantled to reveal the nerve-agent components.

  “So you can assure them back home nobody will ever use this stuff,” Ahmed explains.

  Morgon briefly gives the young Iraqi his full attention. Ahmed throws up his hands in protest. “Hey, we’re Sunnis; some of my family has ties to the former regime. Nobody is gonna say shit about finding this.”

  Morgon nods, turns, and walks toward the shed. As his boots crunch on the hardpan, he’s thinking how the last time he did this it had been a tactical exercise, reminiscent of the military. He’d had to creep up on the house outside Juarez. There were security guards to evade and terrain, distance, the sun, and wind direction to factor in. That target was a tier one scumbag and putting him down was doing the world a favor. Now the shed is only a few steps away and he’s thinking how the guy in there is just a jerk who had too much sun, who had an idea and you could explain it to him all goddamn day and he wouldn’t get it, why he has to go away.

  A bearded man in a headdress stands guard in front of the shack. A screwdriver is jammed into the lock hasp that secures the corrugated metal door. Half-assed. Like parking a gas and air rig next to the high explosives. The guard removes the screwdriver and opens the door. Morgon steps in.

  Richard Noland squats on a dirty bare mattress in a sudden rectangle of blinding light. Squinting, he can’t make out Morgon, who makes a black silhouette backlit by the rising sun. Fat, shiny bluebottle flies buzz around a pail used as a toilet. The steel walls are heating up, and the pail reeks. Empty plastic water bottles and tinfoil food wrappers clutter the cement floor. Like Ahmed said, Noland should have stayed in Memphis. But here he is, wallowing in filth, chasing his get-rich-quick dream.

  Noland blinks and raises his hand in a futile attempt to see better as Morgon removes the folded photocopy from his pocket. He’s grown a little more beard, his greasy dishwater hair is a bit more tangled, and his face has added a layer of grime.

  “Who the hell are you? What are they doing out there?” Noland blurts. “I hear them digging. I been in here for days, crapping in a bucket, for Christ’s sake . . .”

  “Richard Noland?” Morgon asks as he folds the ID sheet and tucks it in hi
s pocket.

  “Yeah, right. Quit screwing around. You’re an American, right? So get me out of here,” he almost shouts.

  As Morgon eases out the Beretta, the thought occurs that Noland wouldn’t be in this fix if he’d remembered he was an American too.

  Of all the possible words a man could choose at a moment like this, the best Noland can summon up is “Hey—shit?” Blinded by the blazing sunlight he probably can’t even see the pistol leveling at his face.

  The first shot strikes left of the nose, punches through his throat, exits the back of his neck, and plinks a hole in the corrugated wall. As he pitches to the side, a thin spoke of laser-bright light pops from the bullet hole and bisects the dark interior of the shed. Maybe it’s the arch scent of cordite or the seep of blood. The flies rise in an agitated swarm. Noland has fallen on his side, quivering. Morgon steps forward, places his boot on the twitching shoulder, pushes him on his back, and fires twice more into his chest. Then he squats, quickly retrieves and pockets the three expended casings, gets up, turns, and walks from the shed.

  The guard and another tribesman enter the shed, and each grab one of Noland’s ankles and drag him out into the sun and then toward the excavation trench. Morgon follows behind them.

  Ahmed joins him as the two draggers toss Noland’s body over the edge, where it does a ragdoll tumble and winds up spread-eagled on the nose cones. Ahmed gives a signal, the cement mixer revs up, and slushy, greenish-gray cement pours into the pit. Two men in tall rubber boots take hoes and step gingerly among the dragon’s teeth, spreading out the pour, covering the nose cones and Noland’s body. In the dry desert air the cement coursing down the chute gives off a damp odor somewhere between dirty socks and yeast.

  “You verify the rounds are being properly disposed of?” Ahmed asks.

  “Looks good to me,” Morgon says. “What about him?” he nods toward Noland’s half-submerged corpse.

  “On the way out the boys will shoot up his truck and put an RPG into the shed. A couple of these guys worked for him. They’ll go to the cops in Samarra and say they were attacked and Noland was taken.”

  “So how long do we have to stick around?”

  “Well, the truck will be through in another twenty minutes, but we should stay after it leaves. Maybe two hours.” Ahmed points to a Bobcat that is spreading and smoothing excess dirt from the trench. “That’s the minimum amount of time for the pour to set up. Then the Bobcat can fill it in and clean it up. After a few days the wind will do the rest.”

  “Two hours,” Morgon repeats. Then he walks to Ahmed’s Suburban, reaches in for a liter bottle of water, and takes a long drink. He shakes the thermos, which is still half full, so he pours some coffee into the travel cup Ahmed provided. Then he walks away from the gravel swoosh of the cement truck and seeks relief from the sun in the shadows of the ruins. Pausing, he runs his hand along the pitted adobe-colored bricks. In his travels he has visited Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Giza, and Machu Picchu. Stone is the only thing that lasts. Everything else turns to dust. How old are these bricks? he wonders as he takes a sip of coffee. Have to look it up. Not real fancy. Lacks the power of, say, Inca stonework. But old.

  Again he touches the surface of the wall and tries to imagine the men who built it, their brown hands setting the bricks. And he wonders what they were thinking out here in all this silence, with all this sun and sky?

  John the Baptist came out of this emptiness, and Jesus and Mohammad and Moses. Bound to happen; you stare into this big sky long enough, you’re going to start building castles.

  Morgon checks his watch and reaches for a cigarette. Two hours, Ahmed said.

  Chapter Nine

  An hour before liftoff Jesse is walking to the crew briefing when Sergeant Bailey sidles over to her. “What’s up, Marge?” Jesse asks. Marge isn’t flying this morning.

  “Might be a good idea to check out Sam,” Marge says.

  Jesse turns and peruses Master Sergeant Dillon, who is bringing up the rear. Sam is looking particularly rough in the morning sun. His leathery face is pasty and his eyes are hiding, as usual, behind his sunglasses.

  “He got a hangover behind those shades?” Jesse asks.

  Marge shakes her head. “Been up all night on Skype with his daughter in Grand Forks. About Ella.”

  Jesse raises an eyebrow, “So he’s operating on zero sleep?”

  Marge shrugs, “Well, you know how he dotes on his grandkid . . .”

  “Yeah.” Jesse nods, mindful that Sam keeps a picture of the little girl, five-year-old Ella, taped inside the chopper door next to his M240 machine gun.

  “Ella’s running a 105-degree temp. Which means he’ll be going into the mission distracted and burnt to a crisp,” Marge says, perfectly masking her concern in a matter-of-fact military tone. In her other life, Marge is a bank loan officer in Grand Forks. She is fond of Dillon, and Jesse suspects the two of them hook up in their off hours.

  So Jesse weighs the peculiar vicissitudes of the National Guard deployed in the instant-messaging war. They are about to fly what could be a real combat mission over the Iraqi desert. And Marge is worried about old Sam, who is worried about his five-year-old grandchild in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

  “I’m up on rotation. I could sit in for Sam. Let him get some rack time,” says Marge.

  Jesse mulls it and nods, “I’ll talk to him, then run it by Major Colbert.” Then she slows her pace, falls in step beside Dillon, takes a breath, and lets out, “Do me a favor and dial down the shades.”

  He removes the sunglasses.

  “Those are some eyes, Sam,” she says.

  “Well, Skipper, I was up kind of late.”

  “Marge filled me in. So how’s Ella doing?”

  “Still running the fever. But, you know, kids can shake a high temp . . . bounce right back.”

  Jesse smiles tightly. The many things she knows do not include insight into a five-year-old’s fever resilience.

  “I’m thinking you should take a break today,” she says.

  “That you talking or Marge Bailey?”

  “You see anyone else standing here?” Jesse says, the thin edge coming into her voice.

  “No, ma’am,” Sam shakes his head. “Just . . . ain’t that life in the Guard: a forty-nine-year-old female sergeant and a twenty-seven-year-old female captain stand down the old guy. Hell of a note.”

  “Can’t have you flying on no sleep,” Jesse is adamant. “I’m switching Marge in to take your shift. Now grab a reset day and go get some rest. You’re off the mission, if Major Colbert agrees, and I’m sure he will. We clear?”

  “Clear, Skipper.”

  Before the briefing Jesse tells Major Colbert she’s got a problem with Sam flying the mission. “Goddamn Sam,” Colbert says. “He put in for the waiver to keep flying past sixty. Word just came through they turned it down. When we get back you have to tell him.”

  “I’ll put it on my to-do list,” Jesse says. Then she tells him about Marge’s concern, and Colbert concurs with her assessment. He okays swapping Dillon out and putting Marge in Jesse’s ship as crew chief. Jesse sends word to Dillon: it’s final; stand down and get some sleep. The way the new crew equation works out, Jesse’s Black Hawk, Tumbleweed Six, will be flying with her roommate Laura in the other front seat—so two female pilots and a female crew chief. This crew mix is called pulling a ‘Medium Minnesota,’ a tribute to the historic mission the 2/147—a Minnesota Guard helicopter assault battalion—pulled off on Christmas Day 2007, when they sortied two Hawks out of Balad totally crewed by women.

  After briefing on weather conditions—which are real good—and the threat level in the mission area—which is real low—the crews ride to the flight line and start gearing up with weapons, ceramic body armor, and survival vests.

  The fourth crew member, door gunner Spec Four Toby Nguyen, strikes a pose and observes, “Now that you upset the hormone balance on the aircraft, I’ll have to take my anti–estrogen poisoning pills.�
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  “Put a zipper on it, Toby,” Jesse shoots back. “You’re still on probation.”

  “So you sent Sam home to take a nap,” Laura says as she pulls her hair into a ponytail.

  “Yep. He’s tuckered out and needs a long rest,” Jesse says.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Laura grins.

  “You just like him ’cause he’s old and toothless,” Jesse counters.

  Laura bats her wide, dark eyes over her wide cheekbones and treats Jesse to an enigmatic Great Plains smile. “I kinda like the way he walks.”

  “Yeah, how’s that?” Jesse asks.

  A few feet away, Marge Bailey glances up from her clipboard and says, “Like a John Wayne movie, Captain. Before your time.”

  “Yo, daddy,” Jesse drawls. “I saw the Green Berets when I was a kid. That’s the one where they have the sun setting in the east over the South China Sea behind old John’s fat ass.”

  “Figures. Vietnam was fucked up ’cause they didn’t have GPS,” Laura quips.

  Then, more serious, Jesse tells Marge to get on with her checks. Toby sees to his and Marge’s machine guns. Jesse wipes down the cockpit windows with Windex and a paper towel. Then she pulls on her flak vest and web harness and loads her pistol. She stows her flight bag and M4 rifle into the cockpit and is about to climb in when two Humvees roll up and eight armed men get out next to Colbert’s chopper. Seven of them are pretty mean-looking Iraqis turtled up in body armor and web gear. The eighth man wears a vest jammed with magazines for the M4 Carbine slung over his shoulder. He’s this wiry American in a black T-shirt, jeans, and a shapeless bush hat with a low brim. Dress code rule of thumb: the more clout you got, the sloppier clothes you can wear. So that must be Busted Flush. The low-hanging hat and his outsized sunglasses effectively conceal his face.