3

The next morning I sit in my bed and sip deep black coffee that is almost the density of espresso. I am reading a copy of the Financial Times, and resting against the back of the bed. I can stare out around at my surroundings and think, for a moment, that I am in heaven.

But my body aches and I am having trouble moving. Gingerly I draw a bath and soak in it. I it is 0500 and soon I will have to put myself together and deal with the aftermath of the previous day. There will be aftermath. Not with the authorities, but within the various competing parts of what is a vast machine for stripping Iraq bare of anything of value.

I dress in camo, get my medical bag together, and by 0630 I walks crisply through the lobby and out to catch an already waiting car.

As walked out of the hotel turned residential palace I turn right and look down Yafa Street, there is the blob of green of the roundabout, and a glimpse of the sign that stretches across the road at the end of the bridge across the Tigris. Sometimes I imagine I can see the river from here, but it is an illusion created by the undulating waves of leaves and heat rising from the road, the river itself is contained within beige brick sides anyway. On the other side of the river is the clutter of buildings that is official Baghdad outside of the Green Zone, smoke rises behind them. Something in Baghdad is always afire.

I look right and see thee circular shape that looks like a 1950’s alien space ship, it sits on a long tripod of high concrete columns and dominates my view. The cluttered haze of Baghdad absorbs everything else. There is no detail, no next tall building, and so the shapes of the near buildings seem to enclose from all sides. I look at the door, around the car, I glance under it looking for bombs, I look around and up looking for snipers. Finally I step into the cool blue car, and feel the immediate burst of air conditioning.

Already in the car is my opposite number from Blankwater. We are headed to the debriefing from the last action. He hands me a folder with numbers on it. His black hair is combed over in a part on the right, it is luxuriant, despite the obvious sings of aging and drink on his Irish features, and the growing jowls from being well fed. His blue pinstripe suit with a Saville Row tailored French cuff shirt merely underlines the weight on his face, by hiding, I suppose, the weight on his body.

His hands, however, are razor sharp. He was a surgeon once, and the preciseness with which he moves papers, unclicks the briefcase, places the papers back in, and then snaps it shut are indicative of a fact that is obscured by his demeanor. He was a surgeon once. In fact chief of surgery at a prestigious military hospital. He wears an even more expensive rolex now. He checks his cellphone for messages, presses a return call button.

“Yes, let me call you back when we get to the Zoo.” So named because it overlooks the former Baghdad Zoo.

He clicks on some other buttons, reads text messages, fires something back, and then puts the cellphone neatly in his jacket’s inner pocket, and looks up at me.

“It was good thinking, sending those marines back. The medivac bounty covered all our operations and then some. Cost plus, God’s gift to contractors. That means the item is now pure profit. The doctor complimented the job you did field stitching him together. You should consider medical school.”

“When I get out of here, I will. But as long as the war is on. It was the obvious thing to do, even without the bounty.”

“But very risky. What if there had been more problems?”

“I was pretty sure that your boys had cleaned everything up. I have every confidence in them.”

Alright, it is cheesy lie, but it is the kind of cheesy lie that can’t be questioned. What is he going to say “My boys are shoot first ask no questions ever cowboys who would be doing hard time if I hadn’t scooped them up for this?” Closer to the truth.

“We also are going to mark up the item. Our expert has already authenticated it.”

“What is the big deal with this one anyway? It was over seven figures before the mark up.”

“Supposedly it is a relic copy of the Koran from early in the days of Shia Islam, it belong to the Ayatollah al-Sadr. Not Mini-Moq mind you, the grand pooh-bah that was killed in 1980.”

“And…”

“Well the Sadrites want it…”

“I think the marines killed the militia that went after it.”

“I can confirm that, after we dialed in the air strikes we picked through the rubble. There were a dozen bodies that hand Mini’s picture on them.”

“And the collector in Dubai wants it, I think as much to deny it to the Shia, and to deny them another focal point for organizing. It’s not just having it, it is that no one else has it.”

“I understand. So with bounty and air strikes, this must have cost the American taxpayer millions.”

“We estimate 8 million dollars, when you throw in the cost of medical treatment for the wounded and so on. But, hey, that’s OPM.”

Other.
People’s.
Money.

“So we are going to net over 2 million from all of this.”

“That’s the other thing I want to discuss, our company and yours are having some issues over splitting of revenues.”

“What does that mean for me?”

“There may be some delays in your bonuses.”

I can feel the blood pressing on the back of my eyes. This is the second warning flag I’ve had. The first is that the cuneiform artifact was not mentioned. If I had been in the clear, then it would have been. He would have at least asked me if there had been anything else, or if the contact had mentioned anything else. There was nothing.

Now this.

“I am sure that is going to generate a great deal of unhappiness all of the way around.”

“Can’t be helped until issues are resolved.”

“I hope none of them are issues with me or my performance.”

“Of course not.” He lied.

The car slowed to an even stop, it was hard to see outside, but the marines patrolled back and forth in uniformed calm. The Zoo, ground zero for mercenary control in Iraq, was guarded by the United States Marines. The alert enlisted personnel were direct traffic to keep the double doored entry clear, waving cars along and giving space to those with permits. They checked ID as people entered. I had mine in a convenient flap on my medical bag, I lowered the flap even as I stepped out of the car. I felt the hot blast of outside air, the momentary withering dryness, and the rising heat off the pavement as my boot landed on the ground. I was up to erect, shifting the identification so that both could see it, and behind to the metal detector of the check point without a second thought.

They went through my bag, looked carefully at the assortment of sharp and pointed objects which are my profession’s accoutrements, and checked each one carefully with latex gloved hands. This process was common, I didn’t let anything show on my face, never annoy the ticket punching classes, and it only took a few minutes. I was patted down, as usual, and allowed to walk through.

If my gender had anything to do with the generous attention paid to me, I didn’t mention it, and I barely allowed it to cross my mind. There were certain realities of being in country, and this was one of them: I was surrounded by revved up, highly testoteronated young males who were away from home, comfort and easily accessible sex. Most, if not all, had had their pre-war relationships broken, twisted or severely tested. In Iraq there are two kinds of men: those that hit on me, and those that are gay. And many of the latter group have to at least keep up appearances because of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Believe it” policy which had decimated our translator and intelligence resources. Many came over to work as contractors, because while they couldn’t be in the military officially, without them, we would not have access to a fraction of the humint that we needed.

The contracting companies were happy to scoop them up.

Once inside the lobby, with its vast expanse of black granite floor, and roaring air conditioning, the momentary discomfort of oppressive heat, which is not as bad as you’ve heard, no worse that Utah and not as bad as Arizona, was a quickly forgotten memory. My opposite number was waiting by the elevators. You could look only forward and believe that you were in any lobby anywhere in the developed world, there wasn’t even an excess of Arab faces to give away the specifics. The number of military or military style uniforms would tell you that Baghdad is a company town, and that it’s business was killing.

And a booming business indeed.

We were in one of the elevators shortly there afterwards, carefully waiting to be able to take one without any other riders.

“We also have another issue.”

I wait for the punch line.

“Our contact has a girlfriend. She may be an asset to some other service.”

“I’m still waiting for the punch-line.”

“The contact wants her retrieved, believes she is in grave danger.”

“He is almost certainly correct.”

“We don’t know where she is.”

“And…”

“When she pops we may well want you to be the person who retrieves her.”

“That doesn’t seem like an issue to me.” The elevator slows to a crawl.

“I hope it won’t be.”

He looks at me, and then forward as the elevator doors slide open. We go to the morning briefing which is filled with empty details, and a cloud of concern, because the contact we rescued yesterday has insisted he knows where he can get more ancient Sumerian artifacts, and his requirement is that his girlfriend be pulled out safely. With nothing to do the remainder of the day, I am back in my room by 1300, and given a chance to rest, even though I am on call until 2200.

After two hours of reading email and surfing the web, I am thoroughly bored, and wander down to the bar in the residential hotel. I drink small single espressos with a lemon peel. I once did coffee of assorted kinds, but after almost a year here, my second time in country, nothing other than compressed cafeination worked for me.

I sat there and read through recent papers from various nursing journals. It is the only safe thing to read in public, professional literature. New procedures, tests on various drugs, statistical surveys. The wheat to be turned into flour, to be turned into bread. My daily bread. It was at this point that I felt, rather than saw, a pair of eyes on me. I looked up and over my reading glasses, and saw a black shock of unkempt hair, a boyishly pointed face, which was made heavier by a single eyebrow line across his rather light brow.

“Hello.”

His immediacy was disarming. In an environment where people often stare or look for a long time, it was refreshing to make eye contact and not have an uncomfortable pause. I reach my hand out, but only far enough so that it requires that he shift seats to be right next to me.

“Christiana Rutenberg. Everyone calls me Chryssie.”

“We’ve met before, though under more trying circumstances.”

It is at this point that a scene from some weeks before snaps into my mind, when, yes, I saw this man as we worked to keep a solider from bleeding out. We found a chunk of wood sticking in him, he had slipped it out while I had my hands in the soldier’s abdomen to close off the artery. Moments later he was in with his long surgeon’s fingers clamping it off and packing it in. That soldier still breathes today.

“Captain West.”

“That’s right, I’m glad you remembered.”

“Not really, you remembered first.”

“You had other things on your mind.”

“So did you.”

His eyes are glowing at me. We continue to exchange pleasantries, he drops his card with his local contact information, and on the back of it is scrawled his suite number here. I don’t know why he isn’t up in the barracks area. And that makes me suspicious. It also makes me curious.

I return to my room and catch some sleep. My on call time ends, and I wait for Hampton, who gets off at 2300.