Team Red Read online

  “Yes,” Khalil said.

  “Well, that’s a fucking relief,” DeLuca muttered under his breath. The SAW gun opened up again. DeLuca stayed down, taking the opportunity to scramble back to the MPs, where he shouted above the roar.

  “Sergeant Carter—pick five people to secure the rear of the compound, and put three on each side. On the wall. Pick two more per and tell them to secure the vehicles. My girls are going to be staying with them—I don’t want to see a hair on their heads out of place when I get back. I want the SAWs manned, and cordon the house. If they had RPGs, they would have used them by now.” He pointed to the armored personnel carriers. “Bradleys, one behind the house and one on each side. That’s one, two, and three,” he pointed. “Do it now! Tell the rest of your MPs to come with me.”

  He scrambled to the front gate, where he was met by Specialist Ciccarelli, his translator, and the remaining MPs. Ciccarelli looked like a younger version of himself. A few of the MPs were so baby-faced they could have been carded on a Ferris wheel. Nearly all of them were either Army Reserve or National Guard, most of them with families and all of them probably wondering what the hell they were doing in Iraq while all the regular army military policemen were back home writing traffic tickets at stateside army bases.

  The weapons fire from the house seemed to have stopped. DeLuca’s intuition told him it was a single shooter and not an organized defense.

  “I want you and you at the front window, you on the right, and you on the left,” he said. “Everybody else goes in with me. Spread out. On my signal. Who’s the kicker?”

  A Latino MP the size of an NFL lineman with the name Arroyo on his breast raised his hand. At five feet ten inches and 185 pounds, DeLuca was not his own first choice for the job, though he’d done it before. Ordinarily he used Dan, a six-foot-four, 230-pound karate instructor from San Francisco.

  “Where’d you learn?” DeLuca asked the MP.

  “LAPD academy, sir.”

  “Okay. You’re on the door. I’m first in. Carter, you’re high, I’m low. On the window, stun then cover. Go!”

  The MPs spread out down the compound wall, about six feet high with smaller gates at the corners, the wall the same cocoa brown stucco as the house, topped by ceramic tiles. DeLuca tossed his canteen across the front gate to make sure it didn’t draw fire. He backed up a few feet and gave the signal, holding three fingers high, checking to make sure all eyes were on him. He surveyed the building one more time, held up two fingers, then one, and then he pointed toward the house.

  Chapter Two

  PAST THE GATE, DELUCA CROUCHED LOW AND rushed the thirty yards until he found cover behind a black Mercedes 750SL. Parked behind it was a white Toyota pickup truck with a red stripe running along the molding. Word at the post was, always hide behind the Mercedes. The tires shone and smelled of Armor-All. DeLuca’s heart thumped in his chest. He took a deep breath, then rushed the door.

  His back against the wall, he caught his breath. The others were right behind him.

  “You okay?” Arroyo asked him.

  He looked at the man. When he’d decided to reenlist after 9/11, he’d gotten into the best shape of his life, lifting weights and running five miles a day, dropping twenty pounds in the process, but all the same, the younger guys looked at him like they expected him to keel over any minute. Maybe it was the hint of gray in his hair.

  “Ask me that again and I’ll beat you like a piñata,” he said, smiling.

  He signaled the soldiers at the window to ready their stun grenades, each set with a five-second delay. DeLuca looked at Arroyo, who nodded and told him with his eyes that he was ready. The key to kicking in a door was to hit it one-fifth of the distance between the bolt and the opposite jamb. Too close to the center and the door bends to absorb the shock. Too close to the bolt and you’d break your foot.

  The windows were open. There was no screen.

  DeLuca gave the ready signal.

  He thought a moment, then sent Ciccarelli to the window, where the translator shouted, as per DeLuca’s orders, “Women and children clear the room now!”

  DeLuca signaled go. Even through the door, the percussion from the stun grenades hurt his ears. He hoped whoever was inside had heeded his warning.

  At the same moment, Arroyo stepped back a few feet from the front door, then kicked.

  The door collapsed inward. DeLuca jumped across the frame from right to left, his sidearm leading the way, as Carter X’ed in behind him. He covered the room quickly. His eye fell on a shape in the corner of the room. He nearly fired before realizing he would have shot a large urn, mounted on a pedestal. They were in the house’s great room. He saw a tan leather couch, a table with six chairs, a grand piano, a Persian rug, and a massive swamp cooler in the back window braced by a pair of potted palms. The house smelled of cordite and dust, the air stirred by a slowly rotating ceiling fan.

  “Clear,” Carter shouted.

  A door led to a kitchen, another to what appeared to be a library. DeLuca pointed to six MPs and told them with sign language to investigate, three to each room. Once the dust settled, he thought he smelled food cooking in the kitchen.

  There was a staircase against the far wall leading upstairs. He’d just assigned four MPs to search the upstairs when he heard a noise from above. He had raised his weapon, about to fire, when an AK-47 came clattering down the steps, momentarily startling him.

  “Don’t shoot!” a voice upstairs said. “Please.”

  “Do you speak English?” DeLuca called out.

  “I speak English. Please, don’t shoot. We are not armed. Please.”

  DeLuca moved to the bottom of the stairs and stood off to the side, his Beretta raised, and looked up, where he saw a man, about forty, and a young boy, perhaps eleven or twelve, trembling and terrified, both with their hands high in the air. He kept his Beretta trained on them, looking behind them to see if anyone else was there.

  “How many people in the house?” he asked.

  “Just us,” the man said. “And the women.”

  “How many women?”

  “Four,” the man said. “Two are my wives. And a sister-in-law, and a daughter.”

  DeLuca looked over as three MPs exited the library.

  “It’s clear,” one said.

  DeLuca spoke into the walkie-talkie he’d bought at Radio Shack. “Miss Colleen, I’m going to need you in here to search the women. You four, upstairs when Miss Colleen gets here—only she touches the women.”

  He returned his attention to the men at the top of the stairs.

  “I want you to come down with yours hands on the railing. Now! Don’t take your hands off the railing.” He turned to Specialist Ciccarelli. “Tell the women they have to go to the library. Quickly.”

  Ciccarelli translated, shouting up the stairs.

  The man descended with his son. DeLuca made them lie on the floor, searched them, and bound their hands behind their backs with flex cuffs. He elected not to throw sandbags over their heads because he wanted the older man to see that none of his women were touched or otherwise harmed.

  Ciccarelli gave another order and four figures descended the stairs, clad in black burquas and sandals. DeLuca kept his gun trained on them. Only the daughter’s face showed. She was about eight, an exquisitely beautiful child with long dark eyelashes. DeLuca held the library door open for them, making sure not to scrutinize them too closely. He posted an MP to stand in the doorway and guard the women.

  The four MPs who’d searched the upstairs came down and told him it was clear. He asked them to search the entire compound, thoroughly and carefully, but to respect the property. Too many infantry division squads with ID methods and ID mentalities had trampled crops, broken dishes, driven Bradleys through people’s front doors, or crushed Mercedes-Benzes with their tanks while on missions, operating with a brutishness as old as war itself, but that didn’t help DeLuca win the confidence of the people he questioned.

  He left Carter t
o stand guard just inside the front door. He looked in the kitchen, then took off his flak vest and his helmet, dropping them on the floor by a back door that led out onto a patio. In a small bathroom off the kitchen, he closed the door behind him, then splashed water on his face, ran his wet hands over the top over his close-cropped scalp, and dried himself with a hand towel. When he looked in the mirror, he noticed anew the resemblance he bore to his twin sister, Elaine, and then he remembered why he was here. She’d been one of the best legal secretaries the law firm of Eslen & Winnicott ever had, but Eslen & Winnicott happened to have their offices on the ninety-seventh floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center, where she’d been working the morning of September 11, 2001. “Look at this view,” she’d told him when he’d visited her office to take her out to lunch on their last birthday. “You don’t get much closer to heaven than this.”

  Well, he’d thought after the towers went down, actually, you do, Elaine—you do.

  He picked up his gun and returned to the great room, where Mack told him the women had been searched. He helped the man and the boy to their feet, handling them roughly because he wanted them to understand that he was angry. It was a simple enough idea, a technique he’d learned during his time on the job back home, starting an interrogation in anger and calming down. It worked much better than the other way around, and it seemed to work on Iraqi bad guys as well as it worked on all the crackheads, car thieves, and burglars back in Massachusetts.

  “Let’s sit over here where we can talk,” he said, holstering his weapon as he gestured. He drew a deep breath. “Please.”

  The man and the boy sat cross-legged on the Persian rug. DeLuca let them stew a minute while he examined the photographs on the wall, portraits of old men in agals and dishdashas holding swords and one grainy old sepia-tone of an Iraqi wearing a heavy wool British WWI doughboy uniform, standing in the bright sunlight next to an elegantly dressed white woman in a pith helmet. He pointed to the photograph and looked to the man, who informed him it was a picture of his grandfather with Dame Edith Warner, the last British governor of colonial Iraq. DeLuca raised his eyebrows to say he was impressed, knowing how much Iraqi men liked to brag about their ancestors.

  Finally he sat opposite them, taking care not to show his prisoners, who were technically also his hosts, the soles of his feet, which was considered a serious insult. It was also considered bad manners to get directly to the point without a certain amount of banter first. He’d lectured on the need to make small talk when he’d been an instructor at counterintelligence school at Fort Devin, and he’d even given a briefing at the post when it was clear that some guys weren’t getting it—talk about their families, talk about women to the men and children to the women, talk about the hardships everybody suffered during the boycott, establish a relationship first. Don’t act like you’re in a hurry.

  “You must be very proud of your family’s accomplishments,” he said at last.

  “My grandfather was with the British at Gallipoli,” the man said. “He was a great sheikh.”

  “These are your family vineyards?” DeLuca asked. “And the grapes you grow are for wine?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “We sell them to the French.”

  “Was the weather favorable this year?”

  “The weather, yes. But we have had trouble keeping the pumps for the irrigation going, with the power outages.”

  “Are you Omar Hadid?” DeLuca asked.

  “I am Ali ibn Hadid al Dujayl,” the man replied. “I am chief of police. Omar is my brother.”

  “And who is this?”

  “This is my son Kamel,” Ali Hadid said. “Omar is his uncle.” Kamel was a good-looking kid with big ears and a spray of freckles across his nose. His head lowered, he looked up at DeLuca. Kamel wore a long one-piece white tunic. Ali wore black pants and a white shirt.

  “Please,” the older man said. “We are of no danger to you.”

  When the older man spoke, he glanced around and leaned forward conspiratorially as if the room was bugged, a fairly common habit, DeLuca had come to understand, in a country where one out of every twenty people had been employed in the security apparatus, and everybody seemed quite comfortable snitching on everybody else.

  “Where’d you learn English?”

  “I lived in London for a time,” Ali said. “I was in college there.”

  DeLuca turned his attention to the boy.

  “Were you the one who was shooting at us, Kamel? Was he the one shooting at us?” he said to Ali. “You tell me you pose no threat and yet your son was shooting at us.” Neither father nor son spoke, but from their silence, DeLuca knew it had been Kamel. “Were you trying to kill me and my friends?”

  “Please,” Ali said. “He did not know.”

  “What do you mean, he didn’t know? Don’t try to tell me he didn’t know. Are you a terrorist, Kamel? Are you Al Qaeda? Are you Fedayeen Saddam?”

  “Please, no,” the father said. “He is just a boy.”

  DeLuca summoned his fiercest glare. The fact was, the kid was just protecting his home and family. DeLuca’s intuition told him Kamel was not a terrorist or potential suicide bomber, yet each interrogation dealt you a different hand of cards, and these were the cards DeLuca had to play. The father feared for his son. That fear was something DeLuca could use.

  “Well,” he said. “Boy or not, he fired a weapon at us and he’ll need to account for that. Sergeant Carter. Take the prisoner, please. Get him ready for transport.”

  This was another trick of the trade—never specify a threat. Leave a blank and let the person being interrogated fill it in. They were bound to imagine something worse than you could.

  Ali watched his son leave. The look on his face was beyond concerned.

  DeLuca asked him to give him the names of the women who were locked up in the library. Ali’s daughter was named Nida. The sister-in-law was named Suher.

  “And you have two wives?” DeLuca asked.

  “Amina and Samir,” Ali Hadid said.

  “You must have great endurance,” DeLuca said. “I don’t know how you Iraqi men do it.”

  Ali smiled.

  DeLuca had yet to meet an Iraqi male who didn’t respond to having his machismo sensibilities flattered. Sometimes the best approach was to ask direct questions, while other times, the wiser course was to kick back and wait for the subject to volunteer information. DeLuca had Kamel cooling his heels in a Humvee. Ali wanted him back.

  “Do you think you’d find it easier to talk to me if I unbound your hands?” he asked.

  “Please,” Ali said.

  DeLuca took the Gerber knife from his belt pouch and used it to cut away the flex cuffs, plastic strips not unlike the ties used to close garbage bags but with a loop at both ends.

  “Would you like something to eat or drink?” Ali asked, once his hands were free. “If you would let Amina and the others from the library, I will have them bring you something. Please.”

  DeLuca knew that one mistake a lot of American officers had been making had been to refuse offers of hospitality, saying, “I don’t have time for this.” The principle of hospitality in Arab cultures was ancient, derived from the harsh desert climate, where anybody was likely to find himself suddenly in need of shelter or water. For DeLuca, it was just common sense to go along with local customs.

  “Thank you,” DeLuca said. “Just something to drink, though.” He told Ciccarelli to let the women out of the library.

  “Is he your son?” Ali asked.

  DeLuca shook his head.

  “All us Italians look alike. This is a beautiful house. Is it yours?”

  “No,” Ali admitted. “It is my brother’s.”

  “Omar’s?”

  “Yes. We have been watching it for him while he is away. Since the war began. You know, there have been looters. Many places are not safe.”

  Through the window, DeLuca saw the MPs searching the yard. To his chagrin, one of the Bradleys had dr
iven up to the compound’s wall, but the soldiers from the Fourth Infantry who occupied it hadn’t gotten out of the vehicle. What were they waiting for?

  One of Ali’s wives returned with a pitcher of water and a basin. She set the basin on the floor before the American. DeLuca held out his hands and let the woman pour water over them. She offered him a towel, and he dried his hands, and then the woman went and did the same for her husband. A second woman brought a tray bearing two glass teacups, an inch of refined sugar in the bottom of each, and then she filled the cups with hot chai from a teapot. Ali added another three or four tablespoons of sugar to his cup. When he was offered a glass of ice water, DeLuca accepted even though they’d been warned not to drink the water. He could always take an extra doxycycline later.

  Mack knocked on the door to report that the grounds had been secured. DeLuca asked her to stay by snapping his fingers and pointing to a spot by the door. He saw her stiffen when he snapped his fingers. Ali smiled in appreciation at the way DeLuca commanded his female. It was a ruse DeLuca and MacKenzie had worked before, but not one she particularly cared for. He tried to apologize by winking at her when Ali wasn’t looking, but she only glared at him. It still wasn’t half the look his wife would be giving him under the same circumstances.

  “If I could,” Ali said. “I would speak to you alone.”

  “Miss Colleen will stay,” DeLuca said. “I may need her help.”

  “Tell me,” Ali said, pausing. “Is it Captain? Or Major? Colonel?”

  “You can call me ‘Mr. David,’” DeLuca said.

  “Do you have children, Mr. David?” Ali asked.

  “No, I don’t,” DeLuca lied.

  “If you did, you would know. Boys Kamel’s age do foolish things,” Ali pleaded. “If I had known he had the weapon . . . he did not know any better.”

  DeLuca paused, giving Ali time to wonder what his answer was going to be.

  “I think we were all very lucky today,” DeLuca said. “It would have been very easy for somebody to get hurt. I’m glad no one in your family was hurt, and I’m glad that none of my men were hurt. But when somebody fires at my soldiers, I must protect them. Your son is going to have to go through the system. He’ll be processed at Balad and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next,” DeLuca said, rising to go.