Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 24

  For Carrie, looking at the jumbled debris, there could no longer be any doubt. It was a trap.

  “Get out! We have to get out now! Run!” she shouted. The two Marines started back toward the road from where they had come. “No! The other way!” she shouted.

  Suddenly, as if by magic, mujahideen fighters came up out of the ground from camouflaged holes around the factory where they had lain hidden. In buildings and ruins across the way, scores more mujahideen appeared, their AKMs blasting at them. Sergeant Billings and PFC Williams briefly returned fire, then turned and ran after Carrie. As they raced toward the far side, Carrie saw an RPG rocket flash by and she just had time to dive to the ground as it exploded, fragments shredding what was left of a porcelain sink.

  The dinging sound of bullets ricocheting off pieces of metal and the steel support posts of a roof that was no longer there ripped through the air around them like metal wasps. She got up and ran on, running like when she was in college, conscious of the others lumbering behind her. There were bullets everywhere. It was impossible not to be hit, she thought.

  A machine gun opened up somewhere behind them on the road. Thank God, she thought. The two Marines in the Humvee were firing at the mujahideen who were now coming into the factory after them.

  Ahead, she could see one of the Marines from the other fire team in position behind the concrete and chicken-wire fence on the other side of the factory. He was waving them in as the other Marines in his fire team laid down covering fire with M4s, rifle grenades and a light machine gun. From behind she heard shouts and curses in Arabic as the mujahideen running into the factory were cut down by the Marines. She was beginning to think they might make it when she heard Virgil cry out from behind her.

  “I’m hit!” he shouted.

  CHAPTER 32

  Balad Air Base, Iraq

  PFC Williams saved them. He called in the Predator, which was still up there, too high to be seen or heard from the ground. As Carrie and Warzer half-carried, half-supported Virgil till they were able to roll over the concrete barrier by the Marines, Sergeant Billings giving covering fire, the Predator fired its remaining two Hellfire missiles into the buildings from which most of the mujahideen were shooting. The sounds of the explosions rolled toward them from across the road.

  Once they had come through a jagged hole in the fence, the mujahideen who had come into the factory after them were caught in a withering crossfire between the Marine machine gun on the Humvee in the middle of the road and the Marines with them behind the fence.

  Carrie watched as more than twenty mujahideen raced toward the Humvee from the ruins of the buildings on the far side of the road, only to be cut down by the light machine gun from their position. Thank God Sergeant Billings had the foresight to station his second fire team behind the factory, she thought, taking her first real breath since they’d entered the factory.

  Virgil had been shot in the lower leg. The wound was bleeding profusely; it was possible an artery had been hit. Sergeant Billings used his combat knife to slice open Virgil’s pants leg and put a tourniquet above the wound, but they needed to get him medical help urgently. A few minutes later, the firing from the mujahideen was reduced enough to load him on a Humvee and get him across the canal to Camp Snake Pit, a fire base that was an area of open sand surrounded by sandbag walls, where they bundled Virgil into a Huey helicopter. Carrie went with him, along with one of the Marines, who had also been wounded by fragments from an RPG. There wasn’t enough room for Warzer; he would follow on the next helicopter out.

  The helicopter lifted up in a clatter of sound and dust, the camp swiftly dropping far beneath them. Carrie sat next to Virgil, who was lying on a stretcher beside the wounded Marine on the floor while a Marine corpsman tended to him. Through the open doorway where a door gunner stood, she could see the sand-colored city and the V-like fork where the Euphrates River divided from the canal below. The helicopter banked and headed high over the river east toward Baghdad.

  “How long till we get there?” Carrie asked the corpsman, almost shouting to be heard over the sound of the rotor, the wind from the open doorways tugging at her utility uniform and whipping a few strands of hair that had escaped from under her helmet about her face.

  “Not long, ma’am. He’ll be all right,” the corpsman said, indicating Virgil. “I gave him some morphine.”

  “How’re you feeling?” she asked Virgil.

  “Better with the morphine.” He grimaced. “Nobody ever says how unbelievably much being shot hurts.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We knew it could be a trap.”

  “Couldn’t be helped. A chance to get Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir. We couldn’t pass it up. Too bad about Romeo, though. If you could’ve still run him, we might’ve gotten another shot.”

  “Romeo was a double.” She frowned. “He worked against us as much as for us.” She leaned closer to him. “I think he was responsible for Dempsey.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “He gave us actionable intel—and he knew there was no working cell phone service in the city. Field radios have too limited a range and al-Qaeda was besieging the Government Center. He had to figure we’d send someone back to the Green Zone. The clock started ticking from the second we parted in the teahouse.”

  “So why’d they kill him?”

  “I don’t know. It’s bullshit,” she said. “They shouldn’t’ve. They didn’t need it to set the trap for us. There’s something else. I’m not seeing it.”

  “We left it too long. We should’ve hit the factory right after they took him there.”

  “How? It was impossible to move around the city at night. And we sure as hell couldn’t have done it without the Marines. Spilled milk,” she said. “At least you’re out of it. Your family will be happy.”

  “My family won’t give a shit. Not that I blame them.” He frowned. “Carlotta and I separated a couple of years ago. My daughter, Rachel, thinks I’m the worst father in the world. And she’s right. I haven’t been there for her.” He grimaced.

  “You’ll have some time now. Maybe you can make it up.”

  “Why? So I can drop them like a hot potato the next time a Flash Critical op comes up? They’d be crazy to let me into their lives again.” He grabbed her arm. “People like us, we’re junkies. We’re hooked on the action. Don’t let them do it to you too, Carrie. Get out while you still can. I don’t know anybody on the NCS side of the Company with a decent marriage. Why do you think everyone messes around?”

  “Take it easy,” she said, patting his shoulder. “We do good. Without us, the country’s blind. Doesn’t matter how strong you are if you can’t see.”

  “That’s what we tell ourselves. Listen, Carrie, you didn’t kill Dempsey,” he said.

  “But I did. I really did.”

  “Because of Romeo? Shit, this hurts,” Virgil said, trying to straighten his leg.

  “No, Abu Ubaida. He had his suspicions about Romeo and he’s smart enough to know we’d try to send someone to Baghdad,” she said.

  “It’s not all on you, Carrie. Ramadi’s a battlefield. Dempsey knew what he was getting into. Saul handpicked him for this.”

  “Maybe,” she said, looking out of the open doorway on her side. Below, she could see the sun shining on the miles-wide surface of Lake Habbaniya, like a blue mirror on the desert floor. “What you said before, about everybody messing around. What about Fielding? Is that why he was with Rana? He must’ve known the risk he was running.”

  “I don’t know why Fielding did—ow!” he cried as the helicopter jolted a little. “I don’t know why he did half the things he did. You still going on about that?”

  “The way he died, I don’t believe it,” she said.

  “Listen,” he said, tightening his grip on her arm. “This place, the whole American mission here, is about to explode into a million pieces. Focus on that. I’m out of it now. You’re the only one who can stop it.”

  She nodded an
d sat there, holding his hand till the long runway of Balad Air Base came into view.

  She accompanied Virgil in a military ambulance to the Balad base hospital, the nearest military medical facility. Once she saw that Virgil was being taken care of, she called Saul from the head nurse’s office. It was after three in the afternoon local time, eight A.M. in Langley. Saul was in his car on his way to work. She told him about Virgil so he could make arrangements. As soon as Virgil was stabilized, they would take him to Ramstein AFB hospital in Germany for follow-up treatment, then back to the States.

  “Are you operational?” he asked her. Virgil’s being wounded must’ve shaken him.

  “Cut the crap, Saul. I’m not some weak-kneed little girl and this is an open line. What about Bravo?” B for Secretary Bryce and her trip to Baghdad. “Can you stop it?”

  “Bill and David are meeting with her today.” Okay, she thought, breathing a little easier. David Estes and the DCIA, Bill Walden, himself. They were taking this seriously.

  “Saul, Romeo is down.”

  He didn’t respond immediately. She heard the faint sounds of a car horn honking on the line. Probably some jackass on Dolley Madison Boulevard or wherever, she thought.

  “What about Tweedledum and Tweedledee?” Their respective code names for Abu Nazir and Abu Ubaida.

  “No. I’m sorry,” she said. What else was there to say? It had to have hit him hard, the first time they’d ever had a shot at both of them together. “On the other matter, I’m sending an Aardwolf.” An Aardwolf was a Flash Critical report, the most critically urgent, highest-priority type of communication within the CIA. In theory, when Aardwolf came in, the director of the CIA was supposed to get it within one hour of its receipt at Langley.

  “I’ll alert Beanstalk,” Saul said. If he was pissed at her failure in Ramadi, he wasn’t showing it. Beanstalk was Perry Dreyer, CIA Baghdad station chief. He had given her Dempsey and she had killed him. She wouldn’t have blamed him if Dreyer wouldn’t give her the time of day now, although if anyone had a clue about how things really were in Iraq and what she’d had to deal with in Ramadi, not the official bullshit the administration was putting out, it would be Perry. “Listen, are you sure it’s actionable?”

  So Saul was doubting her, she thought. It was a fair question, though. She was basing her intel entirely on Romeo, who had been not only a double, but a duplicitous al-Qaeda son of a bitch. Except—she’d seen Romeo with his kids. He loved them and he had to know that if the Marines smothered them with help and money, it would get back to Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir in a New York minute. Romeo also knew that if the assassination attempts hadn’t happened within a week, she’d have known he was lying and would have acted. The intel he’d given her had to be good. The fact that they’d beheaded Romeo and killed Dempsey proved Abu Ubaida knew that Romeo had passed along actionable intel.

  Sometime during the long night, before she and her team got to the porcelain factory, Romeo, tortured by Abu Ubaida, had given it up. If Romeo had been feeding her false intel, they’d have roughed him up but would have kept him alive to feed her more garbage and maybe lure her into another trap.

  A slim reed, but all she had.

  “It’s highly actionable. Get everything ready. I’ll be in Golf Zulu”—GZ, the Green Zone, Baghdad—“as soon as I can,” she said, and hung up.

  She said good-bye to Virgil at the hospital and, using her cell phone, tried texting Warzer, hoping he had caught a helicopter ride to Camp Victory, adjacent to the Baghdad airport, and had managed to make it back to the Green Zone.

  “how is v?” Warzer texted back, asking about Virgil.

  “good. r u back? we shd meet,” she texted.

  “im back. meet clk twr my district fajr –2.” Thank God, she thought, feeling the first sense of relief in days. Warzer had made it safely back to Baghdad.

  She remembered his telling her that he and his family lived in Adhamiya, a Sunni district on the east bank of the Tigris. She would have to find out where the clock tower was, probably near a mosque or a main square. Fajr was the dawn prayer for Muslims and the minus two was a little piece of misdirection that meant plus two hours, so they would meet about eight A.M.

  She boarded the helicopter a half hour later, munching a Subway sandwich she’d bought from a mini-mall of American fast-food stores like Subway, Burger King and Pizza Hut on base. For most of the servicemen and women living and working behind the blast walls and fortifications of the big American base, it was as if they had never left home; they had no connection to the Middle East at all.

  Walking out to the helicopter, she could smell the smoke and see black columns rising from burn pits, where, someone had told her, they burned the base’s garbage. It was almost dusk, the helicopter casting a long shadow across the tarmac. Being at this bustling American base made Ramadi feel unreal, like a different universe.

  The helicopter lifted off and flew low over Highway 1, south to Baghdad. Traffic on the highway was light as night approached. It was far too dangerous to be on the road after dark. As they flew over the outskirts of the city, she spotted something she hadn’t paid attention to on the ground. From the air, Baghdad was the palm tree capital of the universe, the setting sun turning the Tigris River to reddish gold.

  CHAPTER 33

  Adhamiya, Baghdad, Iraq

  Perry Dreyer was waiting for her in his office at the Convention Center. The sign on the door read “U.S. Refugee Aid Service” and was a few doors down from the USAID office where she had first met Dempsey.

  Carrie waited at the reception desk while an American woman in her thirties in a neat skirt and white blouse checked out her dirty Marine utility uniform with a big rust-colored stain on the shirt from Virgil’s wound, her unwashed face, tangled hair and backpack slung over her shoulder. Go to hell, Carrie thought. You think you’re in Iraq, try Ramadi instead of the Green Zone, honey.

  The woman picked up the phone, said, “Yes,” then, “Come with me,” and got up and led Carrie through a big modern office filled with CIA personnel at computers into a large private office, where Dreyer, an intense, curly-haired man in slacks and a plaid shirt and wearing steel-rimmed glasses, seated behind a glass-topped desk, gestured for her to sit.

  “How’s Virgil?” he asked.

  “Good. The bullet hit the fibular artery in his leg, but they were able to stop the bleeding. They’re fixing it and as soon as he’s stabilized, he’ll go to Ramstein, then home.”

  He nodded, his eyes on the bloodstains on her shirt. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “No bullet holes in you? Everything good?”

  “No, everything is not good. Dempsey is dead, Virgil’s out and we lost Romeo. So no, I’m not ‘good,’ but I’m operational, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Whoa,” he said, holding up his hand. “Take it easy, Carrie. You’re shooting at the wrong guy. Saul didn’t have to sell you to me. I wanted you here. And I was right. What you’ve accomplished in just a few days back in-country is little short of miraculous. So ease up. And call me Perry.”

  She slumped in her chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Since I screwed up on Dempsey, I’ve been ready to kill somebody. It just landed on you.”

  “Dempsey was a casualty. We’ve taken a lot here—and something tells me we’re about to take a lot more. You’re going to do an Aardwolf?”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll give you a computer with a secure JWICS link.” He pronounced it “Jay-wicks.” The Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS, was the CIA’s computer network, designed for highly secure, encrypted top secret communications. “Maybe it’ll finally wake up those idiots in Washington. What about the assassination attempts and the planned attacks? What do you need from me?”

  “This new Shiite guy, al-Waliki, the new prime minister.”

  “What about him?”

  “Secretary Bryce is the appetizer
; he’s the real target. AQI gets him, they’ve got their civil war. I need to meet with him. We have to protect him.”

  Dreyer grimaced. “Not so easy. This belongs to State. They’re very proprietary. Our fearless leader, Ambassador Benson, has issued orders. No one meets with Waliki but him.”

  She looked at him incredulously. “You’re joking, right? We’ve got Marines having to live in their own shit in Ramadi, IEDs and headless bodies from Baghdad to Syria, this whole damn country’s about to explode and this guy’s playing bureaucracy games?”

  “He’s afraid.” He frowned. “The Kurds are ready to start their own country, the Sunnis want a war and the Iranians are making moves with Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiites to come in and pick up the pieces. Benson’s the president’s boy. We can’t go around him.”

  My God, she thought. Was it possible that Dempsey and Dima and Rana and even Fielding had died for nothing? To have America lose the war and have so many die because of bureaucracy?

  “It sucks,” she said.

  “It totally sucks,” he said in agreement. “When is the attack?”

  “My asset thought it was next week, but that was before Abu Ubaida realized he was a double and cut his head off.” It reminded her that she’d promised him she’d look after his family. I will, she told herself. But first she had to stop a war.

  He took his glasses off and polished them with a cloth. Without them, his eyes were softer, less guarded. “Carrie, this is me—and Saul—asking. When do you think?”

  She sat up straight. She had felt grimy and desperately wanting a shower when she came in, but now suddenly, she was feeling wonderful, no fatigue at all. No worries about Virgil or anything. Then it hit her. Was she going on one of her flights? She hadn’t taken her clozapine in twenty-four hours. Had it started already? She swallowed hard. She needed to get out of here and take a pill. Meanwhile, she had to focus. The good thing about Perry was that at least, like Saul, she could level with him.

  “What everybody forgets, what everybody doesn’t realize, is how smart these guys are. Everybody thinks they’re a bunch of idiot hajis running around screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ who can’t wait to blow themselves up so they can get to the seventy-two virgins. They think,” she said, tapping her temple with her finger. “Strategically. That’s what makes them dangerous. We have to also.”