The Death Trust (21 page)

Once inside the walls, the convoy took on a more leisurely pace. I could almost hear the sigh of relief coming from the front seat. The Cheshire cat turned and said, “Well, here we are. Y’all enjoy the ride?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where can we set y’all down?”

“The HQ, thanks, Corporal,” said Masters.

He nodded, turned, and muttered some instructions to the driver. Minutes later we pulled up in front of a building-sized Arabic wedding cake.

TWENTY

T
he one-star general regarded us silently over the cathedral of his laced fingertips as we stood in front of his desk. He tapped his forefingers together. He was balding and not doing it graciously. A large flap of dyed brown hair originating from a single point above one ear had been artfully coiffed over the roof of his head, thinly disguising the presence of a collection of fat brown freckles. So this was General Harold Lee Edwards, the Judge Advocate General officer for the U.S. Army operating in Iraq, the man widely known as “the hanging judge.” His lean face was pinched and drawn toward a sharp, upturned nose that was mostly white gristle. He could play the character of Ichabod Crane in a movie without having to visit the makeup department. His teeth were yellow and appeared to slope backward into his mouth like the barbs on a spear. The word around was that once Edwards got hold of you, he never let go.

“General Gruyere has briefed me already,” he said at last, in a voice that reminded me of a piece of wood being worked over by a rasp. I guessed he was a longtime smoker. “She has told me to lend you both every assistance. I won’t interfere in your investigation, but you must abide by the rules. You leave this compound, you go in convoy.” He leaned back in his chair. “At ease. Do you know who you want to interview?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “We would like to review the autopsy processes at the Twenty-eighth Combat Support Hospital—”

“You’ll need to see Colonel Dwyer. He runs the place.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“So you will be gone tomorrow.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a question or an order. I gambled. “There’s every likelihood of that, sir.”

“Good, I’ll get you on a manifest in advance. What about you, Major…Major…”

“Special Agent Masters.”

“Special Agent Masters,” he repeated. He checked his briefing notes to make sure he’d got it right. His sight mustn’t have been too good. Masters’s name was on her shirt not three feet away. “Hot enough here for you?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Well, let’s hope the
hajis
give you a break and don’t throw too many bombs at you and make it even warmer.” The general smiled, or at least I thought he smiled—it could have been gas.

Masters gave the only possible answer. “Yes, sir.”

“Hajis,
sir?” I asked.

“Locals—that’s what we call ’em.” General Edwards coughed and looked down again at his notes. “Room is at a premium here since the Iraqi government decided to reduce our compound. Fortunately, in the past week, some of our people rotated home. I’ve got you rooms in the Al-Rasheed. My adjutant will see to it. It’s a few hundred feet from the wall and prone to rocket fire, but it’s not a bad hotel. Also, a few survival tips. When you’re outside the wall, stay away from dirt mounds, vehicle wrecks, and piles of rubble. That’s where the
hajis
like setting their IEDs—improvised explosive devices. Good hunting. Dismissed.” He shuffled his notes like all staff officers do when they want you gone. We took the hint.

The adjutant, a lieutenant colonel, had better things to do than babysit a couple of MPs. I knew this because he said so. He took us across to the Al-Rasheed, a charmless brown lump of concrete pockmarked like an adolescent’s face by the aforementioned rocket fire. We walked into the lobby, where a sergeant sat behind the reception desk with her feet up, watching cartoons on a new Sony hooked up to satellite cable. She got to her feet pretty quickly, but the lieutenant colonel ignored her like she didn’t exist. He grabbed a key off a board covered in hooks. He tossed it to Masters and said, “Best we can do. Hope you guys enjoy a close working relationship. I know the general said
rooms
…” he emphasized the plural. “Got a problem with it, try finding someone who gives a shit.” With that, he stalked out.

“Must be the heat,” I said. Actually, the foyer of the Al-Rasheed was cold, air-conditioned down to about Alaska in the fall. I shivered.

“First floor, turn right. Sorry,” the sergeant said with a shrug.

We took the elevator to the first floor, wondering about the apology. Was she apologizing to us because we had to share a room? Surely not. We stepped out and were immediately hit with the heat—the air-con was out. Yellow tape was strung across the hallway. Eighty feet beyond the tape was daylight where one of those pesky unguided rockets the general mentioned had scored a hit and caused a minor cave-in.

“Be it ever so humble…” said Masters, keying the lock. The room wasn’t so bad—a time capsule of seventies chic. It was almost the height of modern interior-design fashion, these things happening to come full circle eventually.

I cased the facilities. “Hey, look,” I called out. “We’ve got a Jacuzzi.”

TWENTY-ONE

S
pecial Agent Masters didn’t respond to my offer of a Jacuzzi ride, but I wasn’t expecting her to. I turned on the hot water faucet. A small spider scrambled from the waterspout when the pipes began to thrum. A dribble of brown water followed.

Suddenly an explosion, a big one, rumbled through the Al-Rasheed’s foundations. Before I knew it, Masters and I were taking the stairs four at a time. We hit the street and saw a rising column of black smoke half a mile away, beyond the wall. Servicemen and-women spilled out of the hotel and held their hands over their eyes, shielding them from the fierce glare of the sun to get a better look.

“Damn truck bomb,” said one marine sergeant, shaking his head slowly.

By the time we arrived at the hospital set up in one of Saddam’s palaces in the green zone, the dead and wounded were arriving. Humvees and ambulances were unloading casualties, and so were the helos landing somewhere behind the building. Inside, a parody of a Baghdad traffic jam was in full swing. A gridlock of gurneys was loaded with cut and broken people, exposed skin blackened with burns and soot, dark crimson blood flowing from ragged flaps of skin.

The white marble floor of the main entrance hall was slippery with blood and dirt. Medical staff crawled over each new arrival, their hands flitting over limbs, torsos, and heads searching for wounds, shouting instructions that were sometimes ignored because everyone in the place was already engaged in a pitched battle with death. The men and women cut to pieces when the truck loaded with scrap metal exploded beside their convoy were mostly quiet, some through force of will, others because they were in shock, others because it probably hurt more to scream, their faces melted and lungs seared. Some whimpered or moaned. Some called for their mothers. Occasionally, a screamer would come through making a sound like a wild animal, the veneer of civilization stripped away, the casualty reduced to a primitive state of raw and savage survival, frontal lobes bypassed and the reptile brain engaged in the fight for life.

Nurses wheeled around stands containing bags of fluids and blood, or hooked up IVs, or raced around on errands. Instructions kept being yelled as, here and there, patients flat-lined.

The smell of blood, urine, and feces was overwhelming, and so was the noise. I realized that getting sense from anyone here was going to be, as Brenda would have said in the lexicon of nineties’ positive-speak, a challenge.

Masters grabbed a passing lieutenant’s arm and shouted, “Do you know where we can find Colonel Dwyer?”

“There,” said the young man, gore caked on his arms up to the elbows, gesturing at a room off the hall with a nod of his head. A sign on the wall read “Trauma Room 2.”

Masters and I dodged medical staff rushing from patient to patient, careful not to slip on the slickened floor. A PFC was spreading sawdust around to soak up the blood and urine. Trauma Room 2 was similar in size and shape to the main hall, with a marble floor and a towering vaulted ceiling enclosing an enormous space. Giant mosaics of the former dictator illustrated well-documented moments in his life: firing an AK-47 from a balcony, playing the avuncular leader to his troops, being the kindhearted parent to a child perched on his knee. Smiles all round. Stained-glass windows set with blue, red, and green glass in complicated geometric patterns threw technicolor light onto the upper walls. The intricate interplay of shapes took the eyeballs on a journey to the ceiling, where golden stars twinkled happily in a cobalt blue universe. In all, a nice place to die.

The wounded in this room had been separated from the others. They were the ones with shattered limbs being triaged for surgery. The medical staff wore scrubs over their ACUs, obscuring rank. I asked a passing nurse to point out Colonel Dwyer. He indicated a man close to fifty and as black and shiny as a new tire.

“Colonel Dwyer,” I said. “Special Agent Cooper, and this is Special Agent Masters, OSI. I called you this morning?” The colonel looked up from a compound fracture he was assessing. I’d broken with my habit of not calling ahead because it would have been just a tad inconvenient for us if the colonel hadn’t been around, given that we’d come all the way from Germany for his assistance.

“Yeah. To be honest, I forgot you were coming,” said the surgeon. “Can’t it wait?”

I didn’t want to be insensitive but we were also pressed for time. “Till when, sir?”

The CO of the hospital sighed deeply, realizing we weren’t going to just go away, and then returned to the task at hand. “Just remind me. You’re investigating a murder, right?” he said as he probed around a white stick of bone protruding from his patient’s quadricep.

“That’s right, sir.”

“One murder?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve come all the way from Europe to find the killer of just one man?”

“Correct, sir.”

The colonel bent down and spoke softly to the unconscious soldier under his fingertips. “You’re a lucky woman, Captain. No vascular damage—nothing we can’t fix, anyway.” He murmured something to an assistant, then pulled off his rubber gloves with a slap. “In the context of what’s going on around here, Special Agent, have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”

I stayed silent. I didn’t think the colonel was really looking for an answer.

“What’s so important about this murder victim?” he continued.

“Aside from his rank, sir?”

“Yes, you told me on the phone. A four-star. Wouldn’t it be far more beneficial if you and your department could find the individual responsible for all this?” he said with a sweep of his arm, gesturing at the carnage piling up in the room and outside. “You see what I’m getting at, Special Agent?”

“Yes, sir.” Actually, I agreed with him. In this hospital alone, where death was being serviced with all the alacrity of a conveyor belt, the preoccupation with one killing among so many did seem puerile. But agreeing with the colonel was one thing and being able to do anything about it was something else entirely. We both had our jobs. I knew that, and so did the colonel.

“Forget it,” Dwyer said after a big sigh. “How can I help you guys?”

“This is Captain Blood,” said Colonel Dwyer. “Captain, this is Special Agent Cooper and Special Agent Masters, OSI. Please afford them every assistance. They’re investigating a matter of national security. They’re interested in knowing how we process the KIAs.”

“Yes, sir,” said the captain, standing beside his computer monitor.

“Come and see me if there’s anything else I can do for you.” The colonel gave us both a nod and then departed, diving his hands into a pair of rubber gloves held out by a nurse.

“So, Captain Blood,” I said, searching around for something witty to say about the appropriateness of his name.

“Yes, sir?” Blood was tall, with pale red hair and skin the color of a bleached bedsheet. He reminded me of C-3PO. I saw the length of the line forming at the captain’s door and decided against being a wiseass. No one in the line seemed impatient to get processed. They had all the time in the world—an eternity, in fact.

“What can you show us?” I asked.

“The best way, I think, is to take you through the procedure. Step by step,” the captain said. “Are you squeamish?” He looked first at me, and then Masters. We both shook our heads. He moved to the nearest body with short steps, arms bent at the elbows like a robot, and pulled back an opaque plastic sheet, revealing a black female missing her leg and genitals. Her head sat on her neck in a way that would not have been possible if she were living. The captain moved the head and revealed a gaping wound the size of an English muffin at the base; the spine in that area had been completely and neatly cored out. Her eyelids remained parted slightly as if she’d been photographed in the middle of the act of blinking. This human being had been alive less than an hour ago. I wondered who loved her, who her friends and family were, who she’d left behind. I also wondered about the circumstances of her death. Why these wounds? Why her and not someone else? I felt I should be asking these questions on her behalf, regardless of the fact that she was completely beyond caring one way or the other.