Weapons of Mass Destruction Read online

“West of Wolf’s—”

  Sinclair’s warning was cut short by the sound of rocket-propelled grenades. Insurgents had set up their launchers behind the shed. They kept trying to lace RPGs through the windows of a freestanding compound. Wolf’s men were trapped inside. Even when grenades missed the mark, random explosions blasted debris across the courtyard. The squad couldn’t risk making a run for it. Machine gun muzzles appeared in the windows. Trapp and McCarthy ducked in and out, pummeling the shed with multiple rounds. An enemy RPG hit home and torched the bedroom right next to them. Close, but no cigar. Sinclair crept around the perimeter of his rooftop, trying to improve his angle. There was no way to nail the bastards without relocating.

  Radetzky’s squad was hamstrung in a neighboring compound. If they came to the rescue, they stood a good chance of getting blown away. Enemy gunners trained their sights on every conceivable escape route. The scope of Radetzky’s strategic imagination had apparently eluded them. His men rappelled from unseen windows and stormed the shed. Most of the insurgents were picked off before they could even grab their gear. Gunners returned fire over their shoulders as they fled. One stampede of moving targets pursued the other down the smoke-filled alley.

  When they reached the adjoining street, an insurgent managed to hurl a grenade before diving under a parked car for cover. It exploded well in advance of Radetzky’s squad, but the concussion knocked a rookie off his feet. It was Sanchez, a new recruit from Tallahassee. Momentarily stationary and vulnerable, he was winged by enemy fire.

  “Call a medic!” Radetzky shouted. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  “It’s a scratch,” Sanchez yelled back. “I’m good to go.”

  Blood stained but didn’t saturate the sleeve of Sanchez’s uniform, evidence enough that he had plenty of fight left in him. The rest of the squad picked up the pace, determined to avenge his wound. But by the time they rounded the street corner, there was no one in sight.

  “Enemy combatant under the car at three o’clock,” Sinclair reported into his headset.

  “Roger that,” Radetzky said, motioning to three of his men.

  They surrounded the vehicle. The insurgent pinned underneath fired wild shots to stave them off. Seeking cover, Radetzky decided to play it safe. He summoned Percy, who didn’t even bother consulting his range finder. Positioning himself behind a nearby truck, he braced the SMAW against his shoulder and fired at almost point-blank range. The car exploded into flames. The squad exploded into laughter and applause.

  “Bull’s-eye,” Sanchez said. He felt vindicated.

  “All clear,” Sinclair said.

  The platoon reconnoitered in the alleyway. Wolf’s squad high-fived the guys responsible for bailing them out. Sanchez’s wound was superficial enough to be treated without wasting time waiting for a medic. Trapp did the honors. Growing up in Mississippi, he used to tag along on his father’s rounds as a country doctor. Ailing farmers paid their bills with chickens and vegetables, if at all. He remembered playing endless games of Kick the Can with kids whose mothers had gone into labor. His father told him a woman’s screams weren’t important as long as her baby came out okay. But Trapp couldn’t help thinking of his own mother, who had died in childbirth. He wondered if she had screamed so much.

  Having been raised around illness and injury, Trapp eventually got used to it. His gore threshold was even higher than McCarthy’s, which was saying a lot. Sharecroppers were accident prone or unlucky or both. They seemed to have an adversarial relationship with farm equipment. Grinders and thrashers made mincemeat out of hands and feet in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bandaging Sanchez’s arm was child’s play in comparison. Trapp dressed the wound like a matron changing a diaper. He treated severed limbs no differently than surface wounds. Gently and competently. Nothing fazed him.

  Every company in the American armed forces was supposed to have its own medic. What was true in the army didn’t always apply to the Marine Corps. Marines were used to doing more with less, making virtue out of necessity. Wolf’s squad was proud of the fact that they’d spent their own money to equip themselves for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Government-issue equipment only went so far, covering necessities like arms, ammunition, and body armor. The rest was up to individual soldiers and platoons. Pooling their resources, Wolf’s squad hit the sales at hardware stores. They mounted CB antenna, ammunition racks, and extra camouflage netting until their Humvees were battle ready. Radetzky’s men took one look at the competition and went on their own shopping spree.

  Back home, budget constraints starved VA hospitals, regardless of how many politicians promised to take care of wounded warriors. In the field, lieutenants took matters into their own hands. Radetzky made sure everyone was trained in first aid. They all carried blow out kits with bandages, tourniquets, QuikClot, and saline IV bags. The so-called company medic, Doc Olsen, trained them to doctor themselves when he was otherwise engaged. Technically he was always on call. Actually he was usually off ministering to the six other platoons under his jurisdiction. Trapp routinely tended to everything except evacuation cases. He finished dressing Sanchez’s wound in half the time it would have taken to locate Doc Olsen, let alone fetch him.

  “Sure you’re okay?” Radetzky asked Sanchez.

  “Never been better.”

  Sanchez wasn’t just acting tough. Boot camp had taught him to believe that pain was weakness leaving the body, and he felt stronger than ever. Radetzky smacked his helmet for the first time since he’d joined the platoon. Sanchez felt like he’d been knighted.

  “Move out, men.”

  The platoon split up again, clearing two houses at a time. Radetzky’s demeanor reminded them not to let excitement impair their judgment. They worked methodically without taking unnecessary risks. It was just a matter of time before even the most pedestrian search-and-destroy mission hit the jackpot. Another platoon in the company had already stormed a compound crawling with feyadeen. If they were lucky, they’d flush out a terrorist cell, maybe even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s hidey-hole. Then there’d be real fireworks—artillery, aerial strikes, the whole nine yards. The search half of the mission could be deadly boring. Destroying what you found more than compensated for the tedium.

  The squads were advancing so quickly, Sinclair’s team had to relocate almost hourly. Their optimum position was one step ahead of the platoon, where they could anticipate resistance. Sinclair used his laser range finder to determine when to move. The squads were 748 yards away. He could manage 90 percent accuracy at that distance, provided wind wasn’t a factor. The odds weren’t good enough. They were all committed to giving 100 percent to each other. Sinclair started scouting out his next perch. He spied a rooftop with an imposing water cistern, perfectly situated. Usually cisterns were too exposed. This one had decorative embellishments wide enough to hide behind. It was love at first sight. The view would be drop-dead gorgeous, and there was plenty of cover.

  “Range alert,” Sinclair reported. “I need to advance.”

  “Can you wait till we secure the next compound?” Radetzky asked.

  “Better not.”

  “Make it snappy. Things are starting to heat up down here.”

  Sinclair’s team threaded its way through the neighborhood. They were able to move quickly in the wake of the platoon’s maneuvers. His team was smaller than the other two squads, consisting of a single sniper and a couple of flankers tasked with rear security. The flankers cleared rooftops and then stationed themselves in windows or stairwells, depending on the layout of the building. To downplay their vulnerability, they referred to themselves as an escort service rather than a combat unit. Sinclair was their madam. Ordinarily he partnered with a spotter, an extra set of eyes behind the binoculars and scopes that magnified suspicious black specks into viable targets. But on search-and-destroy missions, Wolf’s squad needed an extra gunner more than Sinclair needed extra eyes. Evans, his usual spotter, was in the thick of things down below. Sinclair envied him. It could get
pretty lonely up there.

  Sinclair was still unpacking his drag bag when a dozen or so insurgents converged to engage the platoon. They were better armed than usual, probably former Ba’athist militiamen. The leader of the pack was wearing what looked like an Iraqi police uniform, though Sinclair couldn’t be sure with the naked eye. He grabbed his rifle and zoomed in. Sure enough, the point man was in uniform. He motioned and two groups of five fanned across a meticulously manicured garden. Sinclair confirmed the platoon’s location. Wolf’s squad was preparing to exit an adjacent compound. Radetzky’s was still searching a cellar packed with suspicious crates. Either the home owner was a hoarder or he was hiding something.

  “Heads up,” Sinclair said, talking low and steady as he dialed his scope. “Enemy gunners knocking on Wolf’s back door.”

  Sinclair centered his crosshairs on the official insignia on the man’s chest. The police uniform gave him pause, but he was used to sorting out Iraqi disguises. The man had probably either stolen the jacket or deserted the force when he caught wind of Operation Vigilant Resolve. Or when his parents disowned him. Or when his wife was threatened one too many times by the Ba’athist underground. Sinclair squeezed the trigger and the man buckled into a flowering acacia. The pack dispersed, taking cover behind a stone wall. A hefty insurgent lugging a grenade launcher lagged behind. Sinclair picked him off, too.

  “How many?” Radetzky asked.

  “Nine left,” Sinclair said.

  Sinclair didn’t think about the two dead men. Emotion of any kind compromised his concentration. McCarthy would have gloated over their deaths, hooting and hollering and slapping his buddies on the back. Sinclair wasn’t fool enough to think his more restrained response made him a better soldier. If whooping it up steeled McCarthy’s mettle, so be it. All that mattered was getting the job done, killing the enemy before they killed you. The decision to wage war was morally complex. But once you stepped foot on the battlefield, the only ethic was survival.

  “Make that eight,” Percy said. One of the insurgents had hightailed it straight into his SMAW nest. Dumb shit.

  “Save some for us!” McCarthy yelled.

  Wolf’s squad exploded out the back door. Seconds later, Radetzky’s men caught up with the action. They beat back the attack with superior firepower. This time, when they gave chase, an IED detonated in the alleyway. It was a classic bait and hook maneuver. The enemy must have thought it was worth sacrificing a few men to lure the platoon into the trap. Cowards. Their most effective strategies were almost always suicidal, completely at odds with American values. Real men never fought wars that way.

  The platoon had learned to gauge the duration and range of IED explosions. The instant lethal debris settled, they rushed through dust and smoke to give chase. The remaining insurgents had covered a lot of ground, but Evans managed to mow down two more. The rest melted back into the malevolent city, seething with hate in the hot sun. Six down, five to go. Wolf wanted to track them down, but Radetzky was wary of friendly fire. They were verging dangerously close to the adjacent company’s quadrant. It was time to get back to the business of clearing houses.

  The minute the squads disappeared into the next set of compounds, a lone figure appeared at the gate of a nearby mosque. He paused at its arched entrance, as though waiting for a sign. Then he started walking across a tree-lined public square toward Sinclair’s perch. Places of worship were strictly off-limits to fighters on both sides. Rules of engagement notwithstanding, minarets were often crawling with enemy snipers. Sinclair thought he detected a flash of light, what looked like a glinting gun barrel. But it could have been nothing more than a mosaic tile reflecting the midday sun. Fallujah’s minarets pierced the heavens like so many sacred spires or dazzling daggers, depending on who inhabited the mosque that day. Huge speakers were mounted on muezzins’ balconies. They were alternately used for prayer or ranting and raving, sometimes in the same breath. Sinclair’s Arabic was rudimentary, at best. But he had heard phrases like al mout li Amreeka so many times even he understood them. Once the offensive was under way, the incessant racket of guns and grenades drowned out the sound of holy hate. Thank God for small mercies.

  Even before scoping him, Sinclair could tell the man was unarmed. He walked slowly, with almost formal precision, toward the corpses in the alleyway. It was an old man, so frail he had difficulty dragging the abandoned bodies, one by one, onto the back porch of a modest house. At one point, pausing to catch his breath, he looked up at Sinclair. His expression was difficult to decipher. There was sadness, surely, but also pride and mute outrage. It was a look Sinclair had seen often in Fallujah, and never anywhere else.

  Sinclair kept one eye on the platoon, the other on the old man. He might very well be a decoy, or worse, using age as a form of camouflage. Iraqis were never too young or too old to take up arms against Americans. But nothing suspicious transpired. The minaret glinted without exploding into gunfire. No one tried to recover the dead insurgents’ rifles. They lay scattered, like so many tombstones, marking the spot where each shooter bit the dust. Apparently the old man’s motives were purely devotional. He stopped and rested repeatedly, swatting flies off the corpses of young men much bigger and stronger than himself. Sinclair was always impressed by the bravery of everyday people, often women and even children, retrieving their loved ones in deference to their sacred duty. They walked fearlessly into combat zones, toiling slowly and deliberately, as though protected by a force field of grace.

  Sinclair respected the enemy for venerating their dead. He even respected their dead in a general way. But they were all unknown soldiers to him. They didn’t register as individual casualties caused by individual acts of war, let alone his actions. His response to his kills, to the extent that he had one, was qualified by the fact that they were technically insurgents, not soldiers. Maybe even terrorists. They didn’t serve their country honorably the way he did. They didn’t even have a country, though such dire dereliction was inconceivable to Sinclair, who loved America with a passion he scarcely understood and never questioned. There was no tomb of the unknown terrorist at Arlington National Cemetery or anywhere else. Yet they were treated with utmost respect by the women and children and old men who mourned them not as terrorists but as husbands and fathers and sons.

  Sinclair’s grandpa had taught him to respect death above all things. To revere the game you shot was to transform an act of violence into the ritual of the hunt. Animals weren’t trophies to mount and display but noble partners in a primitive dance with death. In the same vein, if you didn’t honor the men you killed in war, the act verged on murder. Were they not engaged in this very offensive because terrorists had desecrated bodies on Brooklyn Bridge? The Battle of Fallujah, if it ever merited the name, would be remembered as a crusade to safeguard the dignity of death itself, a man’s right to an honorable burial. The old man’s ministrations seemed to affirm that even insurgents maintained that right.

  “A civilian is recovering the bodies,” Sinclair reported into his headset. “He’s dragging them into a house.”

  “Shit,” Radetzky exclaimed. “They’re not supposed to be here—”

  “They were warned, Lieutenant.” An imperious voice interrupted Radetzky. “Anyone who chose not to evacuate is a potential threat.”

  Periodically the tactical operations center listened in on their radio frequency, monitoring the platoon’s advance. Captain Phipps seldom intervened. When he did, he expected results.

  “Roger that, Captain,” Radetzky confirmed.

  “No pussyfooting around. Understood?”

  “Yessir.”

  The whole platoon heard the order loud and clear. It didn’t mean you had to shoot unarmed civilians. It did mean you fired first and asked questions later, if at all. Making the decision to spare the old man had been mercifully easy. But the boundary between civilians and insurgents was seldom so cut-and-dried in Fallujah. When in doubt, destroy. Delay and you get blown away.

  W
ith the exception of Lieutenant Radetzky, the platoon was energized by Captain Phipps’s intervention. His blunt aggression fueled their bravado, something Radetzky discouraged in favor of a more measured tactical mindset. Sinclair noticed an immediate difference. They seemed to gather momentum, as though time were speeding up. Combat time, they called it. Even Sinclair experienced it, isolated from the accelerated action below. The first day or two of a campaign proceeded minute by minute like a regular clock. Then something clicked and whole days flashed by, punctuated not by hours but by how many close encounters they survived and how many corpses lay in the wake of their survival. Fatigue also messed with their internal clocks. They were lucky if they grabbed four hours of sleep a night. Even then, they kept one eye open, half an ear cocked, just in case.

  Sinclair had gone days at a time without sleep during the Battle of Baghdad. The breakneck pace of shock and awe acted as a kind of amphetamine, real as opposed to synthetic speed. Talk about flying high. Fallujah was tame in comparison, a much more methodical offensive. At least so far. He had plenty of Provigil pills in his ruck, which he avoided taking as long as possible. The last thing the platoon needed was a jumpy sniper. He’d probably have no choice in the long run. Judging from Captain Phipps’s impatience, nobody would be bedding down anytime soon.

  Late in the day, Sinclair sighted a rifle team from a neighboring squad, cozy as can be on a penthouse balcony. They scoped each other and nodded gun barrels. Sinclair surfed his radio and found their frequency. The team was led by Lance Corporal Eddy, a sniper he’d met in basic training. They compared notes. The adjacent platoon had seen less action. But plenty of insurgents were retreating across their quadrant, just out of range. It was time to figure out where they were going.

  “Spotted any Iraqi police uniforms?” Sinclair asked.

  “One about three hours ago,” Eddy said. “Leading a group of four or five thugs.”

  “Did you nail them?”

  “They keep slipping through the cracks.”