The Mirage: A Novel (36 page)

It was a ringtone.

On the morning of 11/9, Mustafa and Samir had rushed to Ground Zero along with every other cop, firefighter, and EMT in Baghdad. But because they were Halal and not true first responders, there was never any chance they’d be ordered into the towers, something that Samir had always been secretly grateful for—and secretly ashamed of. He sometimes wondered, if he had gotten such an order, whether he would have been able to obey it.

The other thing he thought about, when he thought about that day, was the jumpers: the victims trapped on the upper floors who’d plummeted to their deaths, many not so much leaping as falling as they climbed out broken windows to escape the heat and smoke. But some of them really had jumped. Samir remembered one old man in particular, up in the Windows on the World restaurant, clasping his hands in prayer as he surrendered to gravity and God. There too, Samir wondered what he would have done, and what it would feel like to knowingly step into a hundred-story void.

Now at last he had an answer. The first seconds after he pressed the
SEND
button were pure freefall, the Humvee seeming to roll straight down rather than forward. Now, Samir thought, as he waited to hit bottom. Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .

Around the sixth or seventh Now he panicked and tried to tell the Humvee driver to stop, but the hiss of air that escaped his fear-constricted throat didn’t even qualify as a whisper. Now . . . Now . . . The Humvee hit a bump in the road and Samir opened his mouth again and screamed out
“STOP!”
but no one heard him, because the bomb had gone off.

The blast was near the top of the ridge, and the main force of the explosion was directed straight up in the air, but the pressure wave that rolled down the ridge and across the pike was still powerful enough to rock the Humvees sideways on their suspensions. The exposed gunners got the worst of it, feeling, to a man, as if they’d been swatted with a brick wall. A shower of debris followed: dirt and mud, stones, tree branches. The gunner in the unarmored Humvee was knocked cold by a hunk of timber from the foxhole’s roof that glanced off the top of his helmet.

“Stop!” Samir screamed, again, as debris continued to pelt the Humvees. “Stop!”

“Go! Go!” Lieutenant Fahd commanded his driver. It was the first rule of the Red Zone: You don’t stop in the middle of an ambush. But the splintered trunk of a Douglas fir had fallen across the Humvee’s hood, and the startled driver had thrown the engine into reverse, stalling it. While the driver wrestled with the starter, the lieutenant impatiently opened his door and got out to move the Christmas tree.

The air had cleared enough now that the Marines could see the blast crater up on the ridge. Incredibly, men were moving along the edge of the crater and in the wreck of foliage that surrounded it. Because they had been lying flat, most of the militiamen had survived the blast, though those closest to the foxhole were bleeding from their ears and noses and staggering like drunks.

The Humvee gunners, more than a little punch-drunk themselves, spent the first few seconds just gaping at the scene. Then Salim noticed the rifle rounds plinking off his turret armor and his training took over. “Chris-
TIANS!
” he shouted, bringing his gun up to fire. The gunners on the lead and rear Humvees followed his example.

The Barad .50-caliber machine gun had an effective range of two kilometers and could destroy even lightly armored targets. At close range against unarmored personnel it was murderous, not so much shooting the targets as exploding them. With three such weapons aimed at the ridge, firing at anything that moved, the number of surviving militia fell rapidly.

One of the last Minutemen standing tried to aim a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with one hand, his right arm having been shattered by blast debris. A machine gun cut him in half at the waist, and as his torso toppled backwards, his finger squeezed the trigger. The grenade flew up in a high parabola, arcing over the pike and landing in the woods on the far side, where it exploded harmlessly. But a Marine in the unarmored Humvee, scrambling up to take the place of the unconscious gunner, heard the explosion and assumed that a second wave of ambushers was attacking from the north. While his brothers continued to fire on the ridge, he swung his gun around and opened up on the woods—and the houses beyond. His first burst hit a propane tank, blasting the roof off a bungalow and sending a ball of fire into the air.

Mustafa had gotten out of the Humvee to help Lieutenant Fahd with the tree. When the lieutenant saw that Mustafa had left his helmet in the vehicle, he was furious. “Idiot!” he shouted. “You want to get shot in the h—”

Thunk!
The lieutenant’s own head jerked sideways and his eyes rolled up. Mustafa caught him as he fell. The lead Humvee gunner zeroed in on the sniper a half second later and vaporized him. The driver, having restarted the motor, shouted at Mustafa: “Get in! Get in!”

Having run out of targets on the ridge, the gunner in the rear Humvee rotated his turret to check on the road behind them. A few cars were coming up the pike on the far side of the junction, but when their drivers caught sight of the firefight, they all made hasty U-turns.

Then a truck rig rumbled into view along the crossroad. The driver had his radio cranked, so he didn’t hear the shooting, and distracted by the U-turning cars on his left, he didn’t see the Humvees until he’d already begun his own right turn onto the pike. By then, the Humvee gunner’s attention had been drawn to the long silver tank that trailed behind the rig like a bomb.

“Fuck that,” the gunner said, taking aim. “No tailgating!”

Just up the road and out of sight around the bend, the members of the secondary ambush team listened to the explosions and the gunfire and watched the rising fireballs and smoke. Because they knew God was on their side, they concluded the initial ambush had been a great success and the Marines were being slaughtered.

Their feelings about this were mixed. They wanted to see God’s enemies destroyed, of course. But that was just it: They wanted to
see
God’s enemies destroyed, and take part in the destruction. What was the point of being a soldier of Christ if you didn’t get to do battle?

So instead of thanking God for granting them victory, they asked Him for another favor: Please Lord, they prayed, lips moving silently as they watched the road. Please, don’t let them all die. Save some Muslims for us.

God, they soon discovered, was in a generous mood.

Mustafa had loaded Lieutenant Fahd into the back of the Humvee so that the corpsman who occupied the other rear seat could tend to him. The sniper bullet had put a deep dimple in the lieutenant’s helmet, and while the slug had failed to penetrate the Kevlar, the impact had concussed him. A dark bruise was forming beside his temple, and when the corpsman tried to get his attention, his eyelids barely fluttered.

Mustafa sat up front and listened to the radio chatter. A Marine in one of the other Humvees was trying to call back their air support. But the gunship was having its own problems: After taking out the mortar, it had been fired on by a surface-to-air missile. It wasn’t clear, from the frantic transmission, whether the helicopter had actually been hit or was just maneuvering to get a shot at the missile launcher.

The convoy rounded the bend in the road. Just past the turn, the woods to their right gave way to a strip mall, the string of shops extending to a gas station at the corner of another crossroads up ahead. On the left side of the road, still slightly elevated on the back end of the ridge, was a single long box-structure building, its windows painted over and covered with
OUT OF BUSINESS
signs; individual letters running along the concrete lip of its roof spelled the words
PIGGLY WIGGLY
next to a smiling hog face.

A roadblock had been set up at the crossroads. A pair of Dominion Water & Power trucks were parked nose to nose on the pike’s eastbound side. And on their side of the median, just pulling into place across both lanes, was a big yellow school bus.

The lead Humvee driver eased up on the throttle. Knowing how insurgents thought, he was inclined to be highly suspicious of vehicles, like those used to transport children, that a Marine might be reluctant to shoot at. “Talk to me, Abu Azzam,” he called up to his gunner.

The gunner was already looking through a pair of field glasses. This was no ordinary school bus. Sheet steel had been welded onto its side, in a poor man’s imitation of the Humvee’s armor kit. As he scanned the windows, he saw no little kids’ heads inside, only big heads in tri-cornered hats, and gun muzzles, and—

“RPG!” the gunner shouted. The driver swerved to the right, as did the driver of the second Humvee. The third Humvee was just a little too slow, and the grenade struck it on the left side above the rear wheel well. The explosion was deafening and the tire instantly went flat, but the armor plating prevented any shrapnel from entering the passenger compartment. Amal, ears ringing, looked up at Salim, but he seemed to be OK too—he was standing firm in the turret, already returning fire at the school bus.

All
of the Humvee gunners were firing at the school bus, whose improvised armor proved far less effective than the Humvee’s. The bus became a sieve.

More militia appeared atop the Piggly Wiggly. They had rifles, another RPG, and a machine gun that set up directly above the pig’s head. Most of them began shooting at the convoy, but one Minuteman whose rifle was loaded with incendiary rounds took aim at the gas station.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” the lead Humvee driver chanted to himself, machine gun fire rattling against his door as he raced along the strip mall parking lot. Mustafa looked ahead, and had just noticed that the blacktop around the gas station pumps was soaking wet when the air itself seemed to ignite and the station disappeared beneath a massive bloom of flame. The driver slammed on the brakes; they jerked forward in their seats and then back as the second Humvee rear-ended them.

The third Humvee, which had fallen slightly behind, tried to brake more gently, but the friction shredded the damaged tire. The Humvee fishtailed, caught a pothole, and began to tip sideways. Its right wheels left the ground and it tilted to a forty-degree angle and hung there for an instant as if considering the matter, before the added weight of the turret armor and an inadvertent nudge from the fourth Humvee carried it all the way over. “Salim!” Amal cried. She tried to grab him, but his legs abruptly vanished as if God had yanked him up on a string.

The Humvee came to rest on its side. Amal, who had fallen against Zinat, immediately pushed herself up, grabbed Zinat’s rifle, and started crawling through the turret opening. “Wait,” Umm Husam called to her, but Amal didn’t wait.

Salim had landed on his back a few meters from the Humvee. He wasn’t seriously injured but the tumble had left him punch-drunk again. Rifle rounds were ricocheting off the parking lot surface all around him but instead of seeking cover he sat up slowly. A bullet grazed the shoulder of his flak jacket and he frowned, swatting at the spot as if it were a mosquito. Then he shrugged and started to get up, and a bullet whined off the asphalt directly behind him and ricocheted upwards and a red cloud puffed out of the top of his right thigh. He fell back, hard, onto his tailbone, and stared at the bleeding hole in his leg and said, sounding exactly like a little boy: “Ow.”

Amal, in a crouch, raised the rifle to her shoulder and sighted on a bobbing tricorne. She killed the Minuteman who’d shot Salim, and another man next to him. This got the attention of the Minuteman with the machine gun, who began swinging his weapon around, meaning to ventilate Amal and the Humvee behind her. “Target right,” Umm Husam said, appearing at Amal’s side. She fired, and the machine gunner’s head disappeared in a red sunburst.

The lead Humvee, having recovered from its fender bender, backed up to give them some cover, while the unarmored Humvee ranged back out onto the pike to offer itself as a moving target. Hunks of concrete began flying off the lip of the Piggly Wiggly’s roof as the Humvee gunners went to work.

In the back of the rear Humvee, Samir sat through all of this in numb detachment, feeling as though he were encased in a bubble. He’d thought for sure he’d died in the roadside bombing, and even now a part of him wondered whether that might not be so, and the chaos around him just the normal process of entering into hell. The prospect didn’t frighten him. The gunfire, the explosions, even the flames, all left him unmoved.

What did finally move him, and begin dragging him back to the world of the living, was the sight of the wounded Marine, Salim. Samir had missed seeing Lieutenant Fahd get shot, so Salim was his first glimpse of the human cost of his betrayal—something he had not counted on surviving to witness. He got a good close look, as the Humvee he was riding in tucked in behind the lead Humvee to form an armored screen for the exposed Marines.

Salim was not the worst of it. The worst was Amal, the expression on her face as she tied her headscarf around Salim’s leg to try to stanch the bleeding. From her fear and her rage, one might think the Marine were family, rather than just some guy she happened to be riding with. Watching her, Samir felt a horrified pang in his heart. I’m sorry, he thought. I’m so sorry, Amal, but my sons, I had no choice . . .

Mustafa and the corpsman both got out of the lead Humvee to help Amal. An RPG round flew by too close for comfort, punching through the plate glass of a minimart in the strip mall and making everybody duck. Samir, suddenly sure he was about to see his friends get killed, looked away. Looked up. His gaze lit on the sign above the minimart, which to his tear-blurred vision appeared to read 9/11. He turned his head to the right, towards the roof of the Chinese restaurant next door.

There was another Minuteman up there. He had crept in a crouch to the corner of the roof, unnoticed by the Marines. He was holding a bottle filled with amber fluid and trying to use a balky lighter to ignite the rag stuffed in the bottle’s neck.