Into Darkness
Authors: Richard Fox
Into Darkness
by
Richard Fox
Copyright 2014 by Richard Fox
All rights reserved
Published by Triplane Press
Library of Congress Control number: 2013914389
ISBN: 978-0-9914429-1-1
ASIN: B00HW4497C
All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
For my wife and son,
my everything
Table Of Contents
Fear made his hands shake. Private First Class O’Neal would blame the chill Iraqi air if his fellow Soldiers noticed his palsy. Admitting his fear was intolerable; a fearful turret gunner was a liability to the crew and the vehicle he had to protect. The rest of his crew wouldn’t understand his fear, since they were surrounded by nothing but night and wind.
O’Neal peered over the armored parapet of his turret. He saw the surrounding orange trees, hundreds of faux suns bobbing and swaying in the wind. He couldn’t make out much else through the trees and bushes lining the road. Occasionally, the wind pushed the sound of a distant generator that was powering the feeble lights of a distant farmhouse.
There was nothing to be afraid of, which was the source of O’Neal’s phobia. His mind filled the darkness with black-clad Iraqis bent on murdering him. Whenever he was in danger of nodding off, the danger became an irate drill sergeant waiting to catch him asleep at his post. Despite the armored protection of his vehicle, despite being armed with a belt-fed machine gun and a rifle within arm’s reach, and despite being surrounded by men who would kill and die to protect him, he was afraid.
I’m nineteen years old and still afraid of the dark, he thought. He loathed himself as he imagined the humiliation of admitting his feelings to his buddy, Brown, or his fire team leader, Sergeant Mendoza. They’d probably ask if he wanted his mommy and a new diaper before going to sleep.
O’Neal shook the contents of a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce onto his finger, then rubbed it into his gums. The pain kept him awake and kept his mind away from the apparitions scuttling through the orange orchard. The distant glow of Baghdad was some comfort; the light pollution seemed to defy the abyss that stretched to the west over the Euphrates River and into the desert.
Something cracked in the darkness. O’Neal clutched his machine gun and squeezed it against his shoulder. His knuckles went white as the weapon trembled along with him. The weapon was oriented toward the rear of the Humvee, not toward the bump in the night. Sergeant Mendoza had told him to keep his machine gun pointed down the road in case some Iraqi decided tonight was the night to drive around after curfew hours. The stacked razor wire along the roadside would ward off any threat to their flanks; at least that was what Sergeant Mendoza had told him.
O’Neal looked toward the other Humvee parked fifty yards down the road. The other Humvee watched over an enormous bomb crater at the nearby road intersection. Insurgents had blown a hole, six feet deep and twenty feet wide, in the intersection, which made logistics efforts along one of the few paved roads in this part of Iraq a lot harder than they already were. Brigade promised engineers would be out after dawn to fix the road, but someone had to baby-sit the crater until the engineers arrived. The insurgents had a nasty habit of planting bombs where they knew the engineers would work.
So the two Humvees would sit where they were until the engineers showed up and probably stay there until they finished the repairs. At this rate he’d get back to the patrol base for a long-overdue shower by next never.
He ran a trembling hand over the ammo links leading into his M240 machine gun, then keyed the walkie-talkie attached to his armor. “Hey, Ellridge. Time to change sectors of fire.”
No response from the other gunner.
“Ellridge, you copy?”
Nothing.
O’Neal cursed under his breath. If Ellridge had nodded off, there would be hell to pay when Sergeant Mendoza found out. He thought for a moment, then figured out how he could help his buddy.
O’Neal pushed aside the strap that served as his turret seat and squatted next to Specialist Brown, who was fast asleep while wrapped in a poncho. After a quick glance around the Humvee, O’Neal realized he was the only one awake in the vehicle. He shook Brown’s shoulder until the Soldier awoke with a snort.
“What the hell, man?” Brown said.
“I can’t get Ellridge on the radio...The batteries in his radio might be dead,” O’Neal said, giving a more palatable reason for Ellridge’s silence than being asleep at his gun.
“Call him on the platoon net. It’s too cold to get out,” Brown whined.
“If I call him on the net, Sergeant Young will think we’re sleeping out here and dick-stomp us the moment we get back inside the wire,” O’Neal said.
Brown rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sighed heavily. “You go. I’ll take the gun for a bit. I bet your legs need a stretch,” he said as he freed himself from his poncho.
Boom
!
Ellridge’s Humvee burst with white light. The force of the explosion cracked the windshield on O’Neal’s vehicle. O’Neal’s driver and Sergeant Mendoza snapped awake to the nightmare of a burning Humvee right in front of them.
O’Neal stared, dumb struck, at the carnage in front of him. Dark figures ran between him and the burning Humvee. It took a blow from Brown to jolt him into action. O’Neal struggled back into the turret and immediately ducked back into the vehicle as bullets snapped over the top of his turret and struck the armored sides of his cupola with hammer blows. He fell on his ass, staring as green tracer rounds zipped through the sky above his turret like falling stars.
Now that he was faced with actual danger, O’Neal’s fear was gone. He pushed himself up to a crouch and waited for a lull in the enemy’s fire so he could get back to his weapon. A round smacked into the ballistic glass of a door, creating an instant spider web of cracks. Through the cracks, O’Neal watched as a bulbous shape made of shadow and nightmare shuffled to the Humvee.
Something smacked against the inside of the turret and tumbled into the crew compartment. A plastic pipe with metal end caps spun in the air in front of O’Neal’s face as he tried to catch it. He fumbled the pipe, sending it into a vacant seat. He reached for the pipe as Brown screamed, “Get it out! Get it out! Get—”
The brigade operations center went by many names. Some called it the Bridge because of the three levels of workstations arrayed like stadium seating, all facing a wall with a gigantic map showing the swath of Iraq the brigade “owned” and a quad bank of plasma TV screens. For those who spent the better part of sixteen- to eighteen-hour shifts seven days a week for the nine- month-and-counting deployment, it was the Pit. The junior enlisted Soldiers who worked in the brigade headquarters and did their best to avoid the many senior-ranking officers, those commissioned and otherwise, called it the No-Smile Room.
During the day the operations center was a teapot on the verge of boiling over. A single shooting match with insurgents, a roadside bomb explosion, or a mortar attack on any of the remote bases (or even on sprawling Camp Victory, where the brigade owned its own corner), and the teapot screeched with activity. Calls for fire support, casualty evacuation, situation reports, and intelligence assessments would rocket around the operations center as the brigade command team tried to control a battle it could neither see nor touch. The boiling teapot sputtered with activity until the wounded were recovered, the enemy broke contact, or harried route-clearance teams neutralized the bomb. Then, as if someone had snapped off the burner, the steam from the teapot subsided.
This night the teapot simmered. The graveyard shift had half as many Soldiers on duty as the day shift. Most passed the time watching movies illicitly added to the brigade’s intranet or crafting yet another untruthful e-mail for friends and family back home, assuring them that the war was faraway and that there was no danger. The battalion liaison officers rarely strayed more than arm’s distance from their phones and computers, ready for the phone call that would wreck an otherwise-quiet evening.
Despite the relative calm, Captain Eric Ritter was having a lousy night. Soon after his assignment to the brigade, some enterprising personnel officer had looked over his bio sheet and told the brigade commander Eric was fluent in Arabic. Instead of taking over an intelligence section at one of the battalions or working on the brigade staff, Ritter was promptly assigned to translation duty. There was an impressive backlog of evidence and sworn statements from Iraqi prisoners that needed to be translated, which was why he was up so late at night. And why he was engaged in a frustrating conversation with the brigade detainee manager.
“I’m telling you, this piece of paper isn’t a bomb diagram. It’s a homework assignment from an Electrical Engineering 101 course.” Ritter tapped a finger on a sheet of paper inside a plastic sheath marked
Evidence
.
“Well, the interpreter that found the evidence is positive it’s instructions for making an IED,” Captain Joe Mattingly said. Improvised Explosive Devices were the insurgents’ deadliest weapon, and any Iraqi associated with them garnered special attention from American forces. His eyes were red but open thanks to the copious amounts of the oily coffee he drank, available from a dirty corner of the operations center. He had two piles of manila folders on either flank, each bearing the photo and information sheet of a scared-looking Iraqi on the outside.
“I read the sworn statement from that interpreter,” Ritter said. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t finish the Iraqi equivalent of middle school. Look, this is the only piece of derogatory information on this Iraqi, and it isn’t even legit. Why don’t we recommend his release and move on to the next file?”
Mattingly’s eye went wide at the suggestion. He cast a furtive glance toward the uppermost row of seating, where Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds held court. Reynolds was preoccupied, scowling at something on his laptop. “I know you’re new here, but let me explain how this works. Detainee review boards are nothing more than theater. All of these guys”—he patted the top of each pile—“will go to the prison at Camp Cropper. If their file is weak, like this aspiring student’s, they’ll be released in a few months.”
“Wait. What?” Ritter said. “This guy hasn’t done anything to us, but we’re going to send him to Cropper, where he’ll make friends with hard-core
jihadis
and come back home all pissed off that we sent him to prison? Explain this logic to me, please.”
Mattingly lowered his voice. “It’s all about our percentages. Every other week we report what percentage of detainees we send from our detention facility up the chain to Cropper. If the percentage is low, then Division assumes we don’t know what we’re doing out here. If our percentage is high, then we’re great Americans, and Division is pleased.”
Ritter kept his protests to himself. He was too new to the unit to fully understand the ins and outs of politics on the brigade staff. He could effect change once he knew the players and the game.
“Then why are we going through all these files if their fate is predestined?” he asked.
“So that when Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds makes the determination to send him to Cropper, I can tell him that the file was fully reviewed.” Mattingly scrawled some notes on the bottom of the detainee’s cover sheet and moved the packet to the smaller of the two files. “Every so often Reynolds will let one or two go. A one hundred percent rate would be suspicious. Maybe this guy will get lucky.”
“Good evening, gentlemen. How goes the labor?” Captain Jennifer Mattingly asked as she handed Styrofoam clamshells of food to her husband and Ritter.
“Slow. At least Hercules had a purpose and end state to his twelve tasks,” Ritter said.
“Hercules wasn’t in the United States Army. How was the mess hall?” Joe asked his wife.
“Madness. There’s always a run on grilled cheese sandwiches and cold fries this early in the morning,” she said as she pulled an energy drink from her cargo pocket.
“I’ll make the next run,” Joe said.
A phone rang, and a hush fell over the room. A lieutenant, one of the liaison officers from one of the six battalions making up the brigade, snatched up the phone before it could ring a second time. The entire room waited for the lieutenant to announce, “Attention in the operations center” and detail the life-and-death situation the brigade staff had to remedy. Conversation resumed as the lieutenant mumbled into the phone and reached for a pad of paper.
Ritter watched as the lieutenant’s hand trembled, his face pale. Ritter focused on the end of the lieutenant’s pen as it moved through the air. Learning how to transcribe another person’s writing was one of the first pieces of spy craft he’d learned from the Caliban Program. Using those techniques outside the bounds of a sanctioned operation was expressly forbidden, but Ritter didn’t give a damn about what they wanted. Not anymore.
The Caliban Program, a covert arm of the CIA, recruited Ritter soon after he joined the Army. Despite Ritter’s extensive international travel and near-native mastery of Arabic and other languages, the Caliban Program needed him because of his connection to an al-Qaeda operative that had kidnapped a CIA officer in Pakistan. After surviving his first field mission with the Caliban Program, they kept him on board until he “made a mistake and died,” as the team leader so gently put it.
The men and women of the Caliban Program were killers. Killers tasked with eliminating threats to the United States. While most of their targets were individual eliminations with little in the way of complications, the collateral damage from some of their missions included women and children. Ritter lasted three years before he’d had enough of the Caliban Program’s “ends justifies the means” way of doing things.
Ritter wrote down ten numbers before the lieutenant put the phone to rest on the table. The lieutenant didn’t hang up the phone; whoever was on the other end of the call needed information or guidance immediately and didn’t want to wait for a callback.
The ten digits weren’t a phone number; they were grid coordinates. Ritter plotted the grid on the operation center’s map board, where he saw a laminated picture of a Humvee tacked to the spot.
The lieutenant smoothed the front of his uniform with a nervous gesture and climbed the stairs to Reynolds’s perch. Reynolds, his attention still on his laptop, ignored the lieutenant. The lieutenant almost spoke to Reynolds but balked. No one in the operations center spoke to Reynolds without his acquiescence; to do otherwise would trigger a loud and public dressing down featuring the worst in English profanity.
“Something’s up,” Ritter said as he wrote the grid on a yellow sticky note. He left his seat and made his way to the next-lower aisle.
The intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) section managed the brigade’s handful of unmanned drones. The video footage from the drones was streamed to the bank of plasma TVs across from the section, providing the operations center a real-time view of the battlefield. The officer in charge of the ISR night shift, First Lieutenant Cindy Davis, smiled as Ritter approached.
Ritter smiled back, doing his best to keep up the appearance of a friendly conversation. He kept the sticky pad cupped in his hand as he squeezed behind Davis. He knelt next to her, taking cover from Reynolds’s view.
Ritter slipped the sticky note onto the desk next to Davis’s mouse pad. “Act casual,” he said.
“Sure, this situation is totally casual,” Davis said.
“Once that lieutenant screws up the courage to speak with Reynolds, he’ll ask for permission for one of your drones to check out that grid,” Ritter said. “Think we can get a drone over there now and save some time?”
Davis took the sticky note and tapped the grid into a chat box on her laptop along with some quick instructions to the distant drone pilots. A few seconds later, the footage on one of the plasma screens broke off from a leisurely scan of a highway and cut across the countryside.
“No problem. Tonight’s show is a rerun,” she said. She cocked her head to the side, the dark-red bob of her hair shifting to reveal a decidedly nonregulation flower-shaped earring. “Why don’t you sit in the conveniently empty chair next to me? Reynolds is talking to the lieutenant now.”
Ritter scooted into the seat. “Sorry—old, paranoid habits are hard to break.”
“Now everyone will think we’re flirting, not reallocating brigade assets without Reynolds’s permission.” She gave him a wink. The drone footage passed over a white truck speeding along a dirt road.
“Looks like we found a curfew violator,” she said. “Want to follow it?”
“Let’s scope out the grid first.”
The lieutenant broke away from Reynolds and tromped down the stairs. He thrust a piece of paper at Davis.
“Can you send a drone to take a look at this grid? Dragon Company heard an explosion in their sector, and they can’t raise one of their observation teams on the net,” the lieutenant said. Davis wrenched the paper from the lieutenant’s iron grip. The lieutenant chewed his lower lip and shifted his weight to either foot as he stared a hole in the TV monitors.
Davis double-checked the grid and gave a suspicious look to Ritter. “We’re already on it.”
“What? How—”
“Military intelligence officers never reveal their tricks,” Ritter said. “When was the explosion?”
“About thirty…thirty-five minutes ago.”
Ritter scratched his head and looked back at the lieutenant. “That long?” Ritter asked. “When was the last radio contact with the team?”
The lieutenant opened his mouth to speak, but then his jaw dropped open.
Davis gasped and immediately covered her mouth with her hand. Ritter spun around and froze with horror. Two Humvees burned on screen. Flames shone as bright as sunlight from the drone’s infrared camera, black smoke billowing from the open doors of the wounded vehicles. A pile of bodies were laid out between the Humvees, their heat signatures dropping to match the ambient air temperature.