Authors: Richard Fox
The mess hall was a cavern of fabric and aluminum girders. Every day thousands of Soldiers cycled through for the four available mealtimes. Plastic tables covered with cheap red- and-white-checkered tablecloths ran from one end to the other. An unceasing groan of folding chairs across linoleum floors kept conversations loud and, by necessity, impersonal.
This mess hall featured a personal pizza station, ice cream, and rows of coolers stocked with sodas, Rip It energy drinks, and sickening near beer. Hamburgers of grayish meat were always available along with generous portions of french fries. Each day the mess hall featured a different lunch and dinner from a rotating schedule of meals frozen in the United States and shipped to Iraq. For breakfast, a design-your-own omelet station was available. By this point in the war, a Soldier could deploy for a year and never eat from the bagged MREs, meals ready to eat.
The place was on par with the half dozen mess halls at Camp Victory. Younger Soldiers, those who had missed out on the austerity of the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom, still complained about the food. Their only recourse was the nearby connex-cum-restaurant stalls serving food and ice cream from America’s favorite fast-food restaurants.
On occasion, Soldiers from the Spartan patrol bases found their way into the mess hall. Their uniforms were caked with road dust and sweat, and their rifles were kitted out with optics and lasers. They gawked at the sheer size of it all and opted for the simple hamburger and french fries. They ate in silent knots, barbarians wary of the more civilized locals. They rarely ate dessert, as though guilty to have a luxury denied to their fellows who were still at the patrol base.
Ritter and Davis sat across from each other, both pecking at their food—his a plate of chili and rice, hers a chicken cordon bleu hockey puck. They hadn’t spoken much since she found him at the brigade aid station following yet another traumatic brain injury exam. She’d moved closer to hug him but stopped herself halfway. She’d simply inquired how he was, then left. She’d avoided him the next day, finally joining him for this unsurprising lunch.
Ritter took out a clear plastic baggie filled with 800 mg Motrin tablets, colloquially named “horse tablets.” He popped two pills and chased them down with bottled water.
“How bad are the headaches?” she asked.
“Better, actually. Now it feels like a hammer-wielding midget, not Thor, is pounding on my skull,” Ritter said.
“Sounds like a hangover without the upside of getting drunk,” she quipped. “Is that all they gave you?”
Ritter nodded. “Motrin and water, medic’s cure for anything that isn’t bleeding.” He checked his watch; they had plenty of time.
“You know”—she stabbed at her cordon bleu with her knife, a cheese-like substance welling to the surface—“no one would question if you skipped the service. You haven’t been to other memorials. I don’t know if you’re superstitious or…” The memorial service for Mattingly and the other two Soldiers who had died was half an hour away.
“We all mourn differently.” He pushed his plate away, his appetite gone. “Is Joe still here? He was supposed to go back to the States yesterday.”
“There was some paper work hiccup, but he should leave tonight,” she said.
Joe had suffered a nervous breakdown after learning his wife was dead. A series of powerful medications had brought him under control, and the brigade commander had placed him on emergency leave to bury Jennifer. No one knew whether their daughter had been told.
“Think we’ll see him again?” Ritter asked.
“No. Rumor is he’ll stay in the rear detachment back home. Can’t see how he’d be any use out here anymore.” She placed her hands on either side of her tray and nibbled her lower lip. “Eric, I know I’ve been a bit weird since Jennifer…passed. We’re Soldiers. Death is part of—”
“Excuse me. Coming through!” A burly civilian in the pseudo-hunting khakis of a personnel security team jostled his way past Davis. She scooted her chair closer to the table and looked away from Ritter.
The distraction provided enough time for someone to slip a note beneath Ritter’s hand resting next to his tray. He automatically slipped it beneath the table’s edge, a somatic reflex conditioned by years of intelligence field craft. He looked down, ignoring Davis as he read the note.
Roadside
2 Min
CLB
Ritter couldn’t decide which pissed him off more—their nerve or their timing? CLB could only mean one thing, Caliban. His old associates wanted a word with him.
“Cindy, I’m going to go. I’ll see you at the service.” He grabbed his rifle from the floor and stood up. Ritter hated himself as Davis’s chin quivered. Was she about to cry or shout at him? He wanted to stay, to listen to her, and to help her process Jennifer’s death. But the people who demanded his attention didn’t take no for an answer.
He laid a hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze before he picked up his tray and left.
Ritter walked quickly from the mess hall and dumped his food in the garbage bin. He should have left it all with Cindy, but that act would have generated attention, raised his profile in the mess hall. This was the time to do everything as normally and predictably as possible. The midafternoon heat pressed against him like a cooling iron as he jogged past the concrete T-walls protecting the mess hall from mortars and toward the asphalt road beyond the parking lot, which was full of SUVs.
He stopped at the road and checked his watch. Only seconds to spare. An SUV with tinted windows pulled out of the parking lot and stopped in front of him. He heard the rear door unlock as he reached for the handle.
As he grasped the hot metal of the handle, he paused. He’d left them. He’d left them, and they’d made it clear that there was no coming back after a termination like his. He toyed with the idea of flipping off whoever was in that SUV and moving on with his life—the same way he’d done so two years ago.
But why did they want him? Hibou’s plea for “outside assistance” came to mind. If this contact and the missing Soldiers were related, the lead would be worth pursuing. He opened the door.
The backseat was empty. A Hispanic man with massive shoulders and a neck as thick as Ritter’s thigh sat in the driver’s seat. The man looked at Ritter and lowered his sunglasses enough for Ritter to see his eyes. He winked.
Ritter hadn’t seen Carlos in years. The whole scene was reminiscent of the first time they’d met at the airport in Peshawar, Pakistan. This time Ritter didn’t have to ride in the trunk.
Ritter climbed into the backseat and shut the door. The SUV pulled away as Carlos adjusted the rearview mirror. His forefinger tapped three times, his pinkie once. Ritter acknowledged the “remain silent” signal by scratching his face with two fingers.
The ride would be brief; Ritter knew exactly where they were going. The Special Forces compound was the worst kept secret on Victory. The base within a base never invited anyone inside. The attached helicopter landing zone was active only at night and hosted a variety of helicopters not featured in any normal aviation unit’s inventory. There were no signs at the entrance to identify the owning unit. By suppressing its presence, the Special Forces compound broadcasted its existence.
The gate guard raised the yellow-and-black traffic pole without checking IDs. They drove behind the compound and stopped next to a wooden antechamber protruding from a two-story building.
Carlos held out a meaty paw. “I’m going to need that.”
Ritter didn’t move. “You need my rifle for what exactly?”
“Rules are rules, kid. Give it to me, or I’ll take it from you.” Carlos had little humor in his voice; he hadn’t changed a bit.
Ritter unslung his rifle and handed it over. Now wasn’t the time to be obstinate, especially if Mike was around.
He reached for the door handle and yelped in shock at the face on the other side of the window. A face with a full Taliban beard stared at him an inch from the glass, eyes hidden by shooter sunglasses. Carlos snickered as he left the cab.
Ritter’s face flushed red with embarrassment, both because of his momentary panic and because Mike had somehow snuck up on him.
Ritter got out of the car as Mike stepped out of the way. Mike, reed thin with light-brown hair, shifted his balance to the balls of his feet, his hands dangling in front of his thighs. Ritter wondered why Mike was in a ready position for unarmed combat. Was he going to shake his hand or snap his neck?
“Mike, glad to see you haven’t lost your touch,” Ritter said.
Mike simply nodded and motioned to a plywood door leading to the antechamber.
“Heard you had a close one,” Carlos said as they walked to the door.
“I’ve had worse.” Ritter unconsciously ran his hand along the scar running down his right side. The bayonet at the end of a Chechen terrorist’s AK-47 should have pierced his spine, but, deflected by the ballistic plate in Ritter’s armor, it had slashed into his abdomen. Carlos had shot the Chechen in the face before he could empty his magazine into Ritter.
The door leading into the antechamber rattled in the breeze, the gentle thumps the only sound as Ritter remained rooted to the ground. He felt like a child standing outside the entrance to an amusement park’s fun house of horrors. Whatever was beyond that door, it filled Ritter with equal parts dread and curiosity.
“Is she here?” Ritter asked.
“Of course,” Carlos said.
Ritter sat in an interrogation room, nursing a soda slippery with condensation. He looked under his seat; steel loops were half sunk into the concrete. Similar loops were an organic part of the table, bolted to the floor, in front of him. He glanced at the wide, one-way mirror and drummed his fingers on the table. At this rate he’d miss the entire memorial service.
The door opened, and Shannon strode into the room, carrying a leather briefcase. The contractor-chic khakis and white blouse, common to all American civilians in Iraq, hugged her athletic frame. Her black hair was pulled back in a utilitarian ponytail with a few more strands of gray than Ritter remembered. Her half-Asian features betrayed no emotion as she approached the table.
“Déjà vu all over again,” Ritter said.
Shannon slammed the briefcase on the table with enough force to rattle the one-way mirror. Her dark eyes smoldered.
“Can the passive-aggressive bullshit right fucking now.” She laid her hand on top of the briefcase and tapped her thumb against the second and third knuckle of her index finger: enemy monitoring.
She sat opposite him and pulled a folder from the briefcase. She perused the papers within, in no hurry.
“Your paper work isn’t in order. Keep your mouth shut, and we’ll get this over with sooner rather than later.” She pulled a pen from the case, clicking it open and shut over and over again. Her eyes danced with mischief as she looked at him over the top of the folder.
This is damn peculiar, Ritter thought. They were in a watertight facility surrounded by highly trained special operators. How could any enemy listen in to this conversation?
Ritter finished his soda and burped. If he was supposed to play an asshole, he might as well play it to the hilt.
Something in Shannon’s briefcase buzzed twice. She shut the briefcase and closed the folder. “OK, we’re clear.”
“Clear of what?” Ritter asked.
“This is a covert activity. Some uncleared-but-too-curious personnel needed a stern talking to before we could continue. I don’t feel like handling another spillage incident,” she said. The “spillage incident” she referred to had happened at the Pentagon several years ago. A document containing the cover terms for several covert programs had found its way into the Pentagon’s e-mail servers. To contain the spillage, Shannon shut down the Pentagon’s entire e-mail and Internet system, then pulled the hard drive from every computer where information had been touched. She personally burned the hard drives at the cost of $4 million in damage to the US government. The careless individual responsible for the spillage lost his security clearance. Last Ritter heard, he’d found work selling appliances at a major retail chain.
She sighed and stretched her arms over her head. “It’s good to see you again, Eric. We parted on such bad terms. I know you weren’t happy with the kinetic strike on that safe house. In retrospect, we could have handled it better.”
“In retrospect, seven children are still dead,” Ritter said.
Shannon kept her poker face. Ritter wasn’t sure whether her ability to discuss human tragedy with the same emotion as the day’s weather was a blessing or a curse. Carlos and Ritter would debate who was colder, Shannon or Mike, over a post mission whiskey. Mike had killed more people, but at least he would laugh every once in a while.
“We can’t change what happened. Now let’s move on to what’s important.” She pulled a manila folder from the briefcase, secured in alternating red-and-white-striped tape. She broke the seals with her pen as she spoke.
“The man responsible for kidnapping your two Soldiers goes by the
kunya
Mukhtar. He still has them, as far as we know. We don’t know if they’re alive, but we’re operating on the assumption they’re alive until we have evidence otherwise.” She looked into the open folder; something about its contents gave her pause.