Fobbit (3 page)

The battalion commander lowered the binoculars and wiped the sweat from under his eyes. He kept his fingers to his head for a few seconds, hoping his men wouldn’t notice how he rubbed his temples, trying to press away the noise inside. It was just one of many tricks to hide the tremors. Make it look like you’re full of ballsy confidence, ready to kick the situation’s ass. Never let ’em see you sweat, right?

Not so easy when your skull roared with what sounded like four dozen people trapped on the upper floor of a burning skyscraper, all of them screaming and making last-minute deals with God, Ross’s voice the loudest among them. It had been like this for Duret since that twelfth of September—starting with a low pulse but building in volume. Stateside, he’d managed to keep it under control: sitting in the brigade commander’s back-briefs, he could keep his head down, doodle in his notebook—words like
high pucker factor, blah blah blah,
and
manifest destination
—while the rest of the room filled with PowerPoint graphics of launching missiles set to a peppy Sousa march, laser pointers, and the ticking buzz of fluorescent lights.

Once here in Baghdad, however, the volume knob had snapped off and he was left with battering-ram headaches. Moments like this brought it all front and center: the muttering Iraqis; the bleating goats; the restless, sideways glances of his own soldiers; the scraps of trash snapping in the wind; the broken and bleeding terrorist in the middle of the marketplace.

Fuck!
Here it came again. A tsunami of pain roared up through his spine and crashed against the bottom of his skull.

Ross dead Ross dead Ross dead. Running through the remains of his office, crackling and sizzling, flesh dripping off the tips of his fingers, legs carrying him forward by reflex alone because there was nothing left inside of Ross not already cooked by fuel and flame.

The pounding in Duret’s brain vibrated against his sinus cavity. Behind the curtain of his fingers, he broke into a sweat as, inside his head, his brother-in-law bumped against desks and plunged through the blizzard of once-important papers, finding his way by instinct, not sight or touch, to the blown-out window. Once there, he launched into the cool blue space, soaring aflame into the buffeting wind. Ross was already gone—no longer the brother-in-law Vic had fished with, laughed with, clinked beer bottles with, mutually grouched about the wife/sister with—so it wasn’t really Ross that morning who arced like an ember out of the tower.

Duret pressed hard but the static in his head didn’t diminish.

There were just two things he wanted at this particular moment: his golden retriever, Ginger, snuffling and slobbering against the palm of his hand; and his wife’s tit in his mouth. While Ginger licked his hand, he’d suck on his wife like he was a baby and if he was lucky she wouldn’t catch him crying over all the bad shit he’d brought home from Baghdad.

He pressed and pressed against his head, trying to snuff out Ross. Begone, begone, begone.

They were watching, they were watching. Pull yourself together. This is
not
how a career officer in the United States Army is supposed to conduct himself.

In times like this, he should call on all his training, the momentum of all the years he humped through field exercises, the assault of PowerPoint, the dance of laser pointers across maps, the chess-piece shuffle of sand-table briefings, the subscription to
Military Tactics Quarterly
for fuck’s sake!

He should break this down, compartmentalize the scene into workable pieces.
Arrive. Assess. Act.
Yes, that was the textbook.

But at the moment he couldn’t do any of that. His head was shrieking and there were no empty compartments left. He knew it would pass, but until then he had to bear with it, ride the pain.

Nearby, one of the soldiers flicked his M4 selector switch from
safe
to
semi
and back again. The sound magnified like the second hand on a stopwatch. They were waiting.

Vic Duret sucked in a deep breath, gathering into his nose the worst of what Baghdad had to offer: dust, diesel, dog shit. He uncovered his eyes. He’d been behind his fingers ten seconds but it felt like ten minutes.

He set his face into a more traditional lieutenant colonel mode of expression: accomplishment of the mission by whatever tactical means necessary. He looked at his men and nodded. “Okay, let’s get on with it.”

This asshole in the white Opel was just the latest knot in a long string of rotten luck Duret’s battalion had encountered since arriving in Baghdad five months ago.

It started with Jerry, his executive officer, getting his left leg sheared off at the knee while en route to a neighborhood council meeting in Taji. Then the sewage backed up in battalion headquarters and three of his staff officers—the valuable ones who knew the difference between a head and an ass—had come down with dysentery. And last week, the Sunnis had finally gotten lucky with a mortar, lobbing it (bull’s-eye!) into the middle of Forward Operating Base Triumph, where it landed in the post exchange food court, killing two of Duret’s men as they sat at a picnic table outside Burger King merrily snarfing down Whoppers on their day off.

Now this: a suicide bomber who’d rammed himself up the ass end of an M1 Abrams tank. Fortunately for the men inside the Abrams, the bomber had been mortally injured in the crash and hadn’t triggered the explosives. Unfortunately, however, the white Opel was now lodged under the tank treads and everything had come to a standstill forty minutes ago. No one knew if the bomber was still holding the detonator, or if the explosives were still potent, or even if there were actually explosives in the trunk of the car. Maybe this was just another drunk Local National who couldn’t drive and the stupid bastard had made the A-Number-One fuckup of getting in a fender bender with a U.S. tank.

This was one of those situations you could not prepare for. The patch of black ice on the highway. The piano falling from the sky. What was it Rumsfeld had said about known unknowns? Duret had written it in his notebook and practically committed it to memory: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

If someone had taken immediate action forty minutes ago, none of this would be an issue, but the commander on the scene—a pinch-faced captain named Shrinkle, known for his hems and his haws—had waited too long. He’d been hesitant to slide a foot out onto that high-wire and now a crowd had gathered, including a couple of news cameras. Fucking CNN complicated everything on this battlefield, Duret thought for the hundredth time in as many days. Fuck them and the cameras they rode in on.

Pretty soon they’d be over here with their microphones. “Colonel Duret, Colonel Duret—what can you tell us about what’s going on out there?” Except, like everyone else, they’d get his name wrong. It was pronounced
Dur-ray,
true to its French roots, but his co-workers persisted in calling him, ignorantly,
Durette
. They’d even taken to making a joke about it in Iraq: “This tour sucks, but I guess we have to en-Durette.”

Duret looked away from the news crew on the other side of the cordon and made another assessment of Intersection Quillpen, where this particular known unknown had plopped itself. Everything was the color of dust, including the dust itself. Low, boxy buildings. Tattered posters advertising mint chewing gum. The vomit-spill of bricks where a shop’s facade had finally given way. A tangle of power lines reminding him too much of his wife’s hair on her pillow in the morning. The street, the sky, the air he breathed. The goats, the babbling Iraqis, even the faces of his own men. All of it dust, dust, dust. Fine-grained as baby powder. From dust we began, to dust we’ll return. It was fucking biblical here at this Sadr City intersection.

He’d been called out of a staff meeting with the brigade commander when word of the would-be suicide bomber reached headquarters. Duret had ordered his driver to take him to the site, hoping he could fix the situation quickly and with minimal death to innocent Iraqi citizens or his own men (in that order, as per the rules of engagement). But when he arrived at the scene in the north sector of Baghdad, he realized solving this situation would be like trying to stuff eels into a can of grease. It could be done, but you had to know how to hold the eel.

Duret turned to the pale, visibly shaking captain at his side. “What do we know?” he asked. “And don’t feed me a line of bullshit—I want this thing fixed
now
.”

Captain Abe Shrinkle, clearly a man out of his element who was now paying the price for indecision on the high-wire, blanched and scientifically proved it’s possible for fear to involuntarily suck your testicles up into the body cavity. “Sir . . . sir . . .” he sputtered.

Duret looked hard at him, timpanis rumbling in his skull. “No bullshit, Captain Shrinkle. We don’t have time for it.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Listen to me, Abe. There are men inside that tank depending on us to resolve this situation so they can dislodge from the ticking time bomb and take their happy asses back to FOB Triumph where they can sit in their air-conditioned hooch, drink their limit of near-beer, and beat off while thinking about their wives back home. They don’t have time for wiffly-waffly bullshit and neither do I.” (Duret talked tough, but oh, how he himself wanted his wife’s tit and Ginger’s tongue.)

“Sir,” the captain began again, his voice stuck in a higher, testicle-less octave. “The problem is, we know nothing of the car’s contents. The men still inside the Abrams don’t have a vantage point of the Opel’s interior. We’ve kept them inside the tank for their own protection. None of us have been able to get close enough to see what the car was carrying.”

“You mean you haven’t
wanted
to.”

“Sir?”

“The fact of the matter is, Abe, you
could
have gotten closer, you
could
have walked right up to the Opel. You just didn’t have the
balls
to do it, right?”

Sergeant Brock Lumley, crouched a few yards away, rifle at the ready, overheard the battalion commander and wanted to tell him, “
Some
of us had the balls, sir.
Some
of us wanted to chance it and creep up on the Opel.” That’s what he wanted to say aloud but he held his tongue. This was Shrinkle’s hanging party; let him put the knot in his own noose.

Lumley put his cheek back on the stock of the M4 and continued scanning the crowd, hajji
by hajji. Let just one of them motherfuckers move a single sandal-clad toe in the direction of the car and he’d put a hole the size of a baseball in his chest. Lumley had eleven of his younger soldiers crouched on either side of him, sweat-slick fingertips fondling triggers. They could handle this, if they were allowed. He and his men had the courage, the resolve, and the intestinal fortitude. The balls to git ’er done.

Captain Shrinkle, whose balls were bobbing somewhere around his liver, said, “Sir, we lost the opportunity for recon right from the get-go due to the size of the crowd that formed around the accident site, making it impossible for us to risk collateral damage.”

Duret stared at his junior officer, wondering if he should call him on the bullshit. Instead, he grimaced and said, “All right, go ahead.”

Shrinkle sucked in a quivery breath and described the afternoon’s events.

A platoon from Bravo Company (under the command of one Captain A. Shrinkle) had been escorting Alpha Company as it returned from a mission in Khadhimiya, taking Route Franklin as briefed in last night’s update. No issues; everything going swimmingly. Until they got to Intersection Quillpen where, at approximately oh-nine-thirty hours, the convoy of Humvees and tanks was forced to a halt by a herd of goats crossing the road. Like goats everywhere, these animals had no sense of urgency, bleating and blinking and bumping into each other. The soldiers stared at the goats and the goats stared back, some with trash dangling from their jaws. The goatherd didn’t look at the Americans but picked his nose and clucked at his goats. “Like I said, sir:
no sense of urgency,
” repeated Shrinkle.

Then came a sound off to the left as the soldiers sat at the goat-clogged intersection. Number Three Tank was the first to spot the suspected insurgent vehicle coming at a high rate of speed toward the formation. As the car accelerated up the frontage road, it quickly changed status from a
possible
Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device to a
probable
Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device. Gunners from Tanks Number Two and Three immediately applied Force Protection Measures 1 through 4 and would have implemented Force Protection Measure 5 except by that time the VBIED had already rammed into the left rear of Tank Number Three. Tanks One and Two had moved forward out of the potential blast zone and had established the outer perimeter of security.

“We’re labeling it a failed suicide bomb event, sir,” Shrinkle concluded.