Team Red Read online

  Copyright © 2005 by David DeBatto and Pete Nelson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover design by Jerry Pfeiffer

  Cover photos by AP Wide World Photos

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: May 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-446-51062-2

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  TO KILL AN AMERICAN...

  AS THE RAIDING PARTY QUICKLY DEPLOYED TO cover, DeLuca crouched low beside the Humvee. Two MPs rushed to where the translator had fallen, and then one made a cursory slashing gesture to signal what everybody already knew—the young man was dead. A team of MPs unfolded a body bag at the edge of the garden.

  An infantryman approached DeLuca with a piece of a paper he’d found tacked to the tree, about a quarter of a mile off, from which the sniper had apparently fired. It was the wanted poster DeLuca had seen earlier that morning.

  DeLuca knew full well what the attack had meant. Most Iraqi snipers were incompetent, poor marksmen who rarely allowed for windage or calculated for elevation, and few ever used sniper rounds. Judging from the severity of the damage done, this was clearly a large-caliber soft-pointed shell fired from a high-velocity rifle. Someone had wanted to claim the reward. And that meant that someone had been given information about the mission.

  In other words, there was a traitor on the post . . .

  Acknowledgments

  To my lovely wife Brenda, who is still not exactly sure what a counterintelligence agent really does, and I want to keep it that way.

  To all of the real-life Army CI agents fighting in the GWOT. Stay safe. We need you more than ever.

  To my co-writer and mentor, Pete Nelson. I cannot thank you enough. The muses have surely thrown us together, for you are the perfect complement to my many literary shortcomings, which are legion.

  To Dan Ambrosio and Warner Books. Thank you, thank you for taking a chance on an untested, unpublished writer in an already overcrowded genre. May your trust in me, Pete, and our concept bear the fruit we all feel it will.

  Lastly, to my literary agent, Todd Shuster, of Zachary, Shuster, Harmsworth. You were there from the very beginning, held my hand and guided me through the crazy world of publishing. All that may come from this incredible journey will be mostly due to you my friend, and I will always remember that. Thank you.

  —David DeBatto

  Pete Nelson would like to thank Dave DeBatto, his collaborator, for all his hard work and input, comments, advice, e-mails, downloads, elaborations, speculations, and for tolerating me when I made him back up and explain all things military, and for his efforts to make this book as true to the experience of the Iraq war as a work of fiction can be —I would like to thank him as well for his sacrifice and for the contributions he made in Iraq. I’d like to thank Todd Shuster, the agent on this project who steered it in the right direction and shepherded the proposal through so many different versions and configurations—thanks for your endless patience, your foresight and your vision of where this could go. Thanks to editor Dan Ambrosio for his enthusiasm, his painless editing, and for his ongoing support during the writing process. I’m grateful for the feedback I got from my wise circle of critics, including Jeannie Birdsall, Bluey Diehl, Cammie McGovern, Sarah Metcalf, Karen Osborne, Tony Maroulis, and in particular for the read I got from David Stern, good friend and master of the macabre. Thanks to Gordon Bigelow and Dick Duncan for advice on sailing and sailboats, and thanks to Dr. Chris Otis for talking to me about pathology. Big big thanks to Samar Moushabeck for supplying me with Arabic translations (not to mention coffee and baked goods), and to her husband Gabby, whose bookstore, Booklinks, served as one of my primary resources (e-mail: [email protected]). Antepenultimate thanks to whoever invented Google, without which I could not have pretended to know half as much as I pretend I do, both in print and in real life. Penultimate thanks to my son Jack for keeping my spirits up and for sleeping through the night so that Daddy had some time to write, and finally thanks to Jennifer Gates, my finest collaborator, for all her reads, thoughts, insights, patience, support, and understanding.

  —Pete Nelson

  Prologue

  OUT THE WINDOW, THE DOCKWORKER COULD hear children playing and laughing.

  He lay back on the bed and threw his arm over his eyes to block the light that filtered in through the dirty window. He fumbled for his cigarettes on the nightstand. To say he felt terrible was an understatement. He found the remote and turned on the television, then turned it off again, too ill to watch it. On the end table next to the bed, he saw an empty bottle of tequila. He couldn’t remember finishing it. It probably explained a lot. Either that, or God was punishing him, but he couldn’t believe God would punish him for stealing one lousy bottle of olive oil—not after all the other times when God had looked the other way.

  He didn’t feel much better when the phone woke him up again around four. This time he screened the call. A man’s voice said: “This is O’Brien down at the hall. Look, we got two ships coming in on Monday and we’re going to need a full crew so I was hoping you could make it . . .”

  The dockworker had half a mind to pick up the phone and tell O’Brien to go screw himself, asking for favors after the way he’d ridden him all week. If he felt better by Monday, maybe he’d go in, but right now it wasn’t looking so likely.

  He managed to walk to the bathroom, though he felt dizzy and leaned heavily against the sink. This was more than a hangover. He looked at himself in the mirror. The handsome devil he usually saw looked awful. His eyes were red, and his skin was the color of oatmeal. At six foot four and a muscular 250 pounds, only thirty-three years of age, he was a strong man who’d done a bit of goon work for the union from time to time, but right now he felt too weak to blow the fuzz off a dandelion. He popped two Alka-Seltzers in a glass of water, drank it, and immediately felt worse, barely turning in time to kneel before the toilet, where he vomited for the next ten minutes, including a violent series of dry heaves toward the end that left him feeling even weaker.

  He went back to bed. His lower back ached, which he assumed was from all the lifting he’d done during the week, but soon the muscles in his arms and legs began to ache, and his head hurt. He felt utterly fatigued. When he took his temperature, he found he had a fever of 101 degrees.

  “Well that’s fucking great,” he said to no one.

  He didn’t have any health insurance, and he wasn’t about to blow the nine hundred dollars he’d earned that week on a doctor, so he covered himself with a blanket, took three Tylenol and went to bed. He had chills during the night, and he vomited several more times.

  By noon of the following day, Sunday, he’d
changed his mind about seeing a doctor. He was reluctant to call the hospital emergency room at Massachusetts General because he still owed them five hundred dollars for a prior visit, but he had to talk to somebody, so he placed a block on his phone to prevent the advice nurse from using caller ID and gave a fake name when she finally came on the line. He told her he felt like crap and wondered if she could prescribe him something.

  “We’d really have to see you in person before we could do that,” she said.

  “I don’t have any insurance,” he told her.

  “Can you answer a few questions?”

  “I guess,” he muttered.

  “Do you have a fever?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  “One hundred two point four.”

  “How long have you had a fever?”

  “It was a hundred and one yesterday.”

  “Did it go down last night?”

  “I don’t know,” he struggled to say. “I don’t think so.”

  “Muscle aches?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Backache?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Headache?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Vomiting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many times?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty?”

  “Diarrhea?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was thinking maybe I had food poisoning.”

  “What’s the last thing you ate?”

  “Spaghetti with white clam sauce. Do you think it’s food poisoning?”

  “It’s possible, with clams, though usually if it’s food poisoning, you feel better after you vomit. Anything else? Any other symptoms. Sore throat?”

  “No,” he said. “I think I’ve got a rash, though.”

  “Where?” she inquired.

  “On my chest,” he said.

  “How large is the area?” she asked.

  “Maybe the size of my hand.”

  “Is the area raised and slightly puffy or just red?”

  “I don’t know. Just red, I think.”

  “That sounds erythematous,” she said as if she was thinking out loud.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It could be a negative reaction to medication. Have you taken any drugs?”

  “Not lately,” he said. The dog downstairs was yapping again.

  “Aspirin? Motrin? Tylenol . . . ?”

  “Tylenol,” he said weakly.

  He waited while she added it all up. His head was pounding as he shivered beneath his blankets.

  “And you said your fever is one-oh-two point four?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I think you should probably be seen by a doctor,” she said at last. “Do you think you’d be able to drive?”

  “I don’t have a car,” he said. He had a car, just no license after his third DWI.

  “Is there somebody you could call who could give you a ride?” she asked.

  He told her there wasn’t anybody he could call. He thought again of the five hundred dollars he owed. If he paid it, he might as well not have worked at all the previous week. He told himself that it was just a bug of some sort, and that no matter how bad he felt, he could tough it out.

  By Sunday evening, he realized he was wrong about that, but by then he was too sick to move, utterly prostrate and barely able to sit up. He’d brought a hand-held mirror to bed, and when he looked in it, he saw that the rash had spread up his chest and neck to the left side of his face. The rash on his face was simply red, but the rash on his chest had indeed become puffy and tender to the touch.

  When the dockworker finally called a cab to give him a ride to the hospital, he got a busy signal. He tried again a while later, but with his fever raging at nearly 104 degrees, in a state of only partial lucidity, he dropped the phone on the floor and was too sick to reach down and pick it up. He never made it to the hospital.

  By midnight on Monday, his rash had become vesicular, the red nodes distending into erumpent bladderlike sacs filled with pus and lymphatic fluids, each whitehead excruciating to the touch, the largest about the size of a dime, though they were fairly uniform in size and evenly distributed. His fever stabilized in the night at 102.5 degrees as his thymus, spleen, liver, lymph nodes, and bone marrow began to run out of the raw materials needed to produce antibodies. He spent the next day, Tuesday, lying in bed, groaning and wishing that someone would knock on the door and find him, the mailman, an errant pizza delivery man, anybody. He prayed to God for help, holding in his hands the Bible he’d found in the back corner of his bedstand drawer.

  “I know maybe I never gave you enough credit,” he said in his prayers, “and I never done much for the church or whatever, but if you could do me this one favor and make me better, I swear I’ll change stuff . . .”

  Tuesday night (though he could no longer tell how fast or slow time was passing) his condition worsened. His joints throbbed with pain, while lightning bolts of gastrointestinal anguish doubled him over, leaving him in a fetal position most of the time. The whiteheads on his skin began to split and burst. Within hours, full-blown lesions covered his entire body, seeping and staining the sheets upon which he was dying as his air passage narrowed, making him feel like he was suffocating.

  In the final throes, he trembled and gnashed his teeth and shook violently, his skin a mat of bubbling rubber as he bled out, hemorrhaging both internally and externally, blood coming from his rectum, his fingernails, his nose, ears, eyes, mouth, and gums. Where he clawed at his skin, the skin tore as easily as tissue paper. The hair on his head fell out in clumps when he grabbed at it. The lining of his brain was inflamed with encephalitis, causing him to hallucinate. In his last uncontrolled thrashing, he knocked over the lamp and lacked the strength to right it. He lost consciousness entirely shortly before midnight. The smoke alarm went off half an hour later when the heat from the light bulb in the overturned lamp set fire to the pages of the Bible he’d hoped would be his salvation.

  Firefighters blamed the intensity of the flames on the fact that the old couple they’d rescued from the first floor were packrats who hadn’t thrown out a newspaper or magazine in the last twenty years, providing fuel for the inferno. When firefighters finally got to the dockworker—his name was Anthony Fusaro—his body was burned beyond recognition and mostly ash.

  Chapter One

  IT WAS ONE OF THOSE DAYS THAT STARTED lousy and went rapidly downhill, beginning when DeLuca was called in to meet with Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Reicken in a conference room at the Tactical Operations Center for a briefing. The desert sun had yet to rise, but even at that predawn hour the TOC was jamming, a fifty-foot-square canvas enclosure ringed by armored transports and Bradley fighting vehicles backed up to form a protective cordon, the whole structure roofed with heavy dark green canvas tarps dating back to the Korean War, full of techies, aides, assistants, staff flunkies, translators, and brigade combat team leaders, as well as a handful of DeLuca’s fellow counterintelligence agents. He paused before entering to blouse his boots, because Reicken cared deeply about such things, grabbed a cup of coffee from the five-gallon pot by the door, then made his way to the brightly lit room at the far end of the expansive hall, taking care not to trip over any of the cables duct-taped to the floor. The “Star Wars Tent,” as some people were calling it, was always impressive to him, perhaps because he was something of a technophobe, with banks of computers crunching numbers and accessing databases, the latest communications equipment with satellite uplinks, electronics of all kinds, the walls alive with real-time UAV imagery sent from drones no bigger than model airplanes, streaming 24/7 on an array of flat-screen plasma televisions, the main screen a four-by-six-foot job hanging at the far wall. A tech officer had told him they had more computer power than NASA had when they put a man on the moon. DeLuca had been led to believe he was g
oing to meet to discuss security needs for the day’s mission. Instead, Reicken surprised him by throwing a crude wanted poster down on the table, a photocopy of a pencil drawing of DeLuca that, to his mind, wasn’t all that close a resemblance, with the words “MR. DAVID” and “$10,000 AMERICAN” and “CIA” written in inch-high block letters.

  “Apparently you’re a marked man, DeLuca,” Reicken said with a kind of smirk on his face. “Looks like you’re doing your job a bit too well. Take it as a compliment. Probably put out by some Ba’ath party poohbah who’s getting tired of you arresting all his boys.”

  DeLuca picked up the drawing and looked at it. The drawing took a good fifteen or twenty years off him. His hairline was wrong, his jaw a bit squarer, his nose not bent where an angel-dusted punk he’d arrested in Chelsea had broken it, and it wasn’t an accurate enough rendering that anybody could pick him out of a crowd from it, but it gave him the willies all the same.

  “Where’d you find this?” he asked. It would make a nice keepsake, assuming he got home in one piece. Something to frame for the study, assuming he still had a home, back in the world.

  “Somebody brought it in,” Reicken said casually. “You know, I wouldn’t get a big head about it, but I think ten thousand may be a new record for a guardsman.” Reicken hated guardsmen. Most of the guardsmen DeLuca knew found the feeling mutual. DeLuca had half a mind to call his old friend Phil—General Phillip LeDoux, to Reicken—and tell him what a horse’s ass Reicken was, though that would be operating outside of channels, and he’d gotten in trouble for going outside channels on both his previous enlistments. DeLuca had known the general since the two of them had sat in a freezing cold Quonset hut on the German border back in the late seventies, listening to frantic East German government officials making telephone calls about how the Americans were going to call off the Olympics. DeLuca had joked, over the years, that Phillip only got into Officer’s Candidate School because DeLuca turned them down. LeDoux was an excellent example of what good a man could do committing his life to the military. Reicken was a paper-pushing bureaucrat who couldn’t carry LeDoux’s shorts.