Betrayal

A few seconds later, the three men in black fatigues appeared outside the front door again. Two of them bolted back toward the car, while the third reentered the building, then emerged on a dead run just as his two colleagues got to the car. Behind him, in the house, two nearly simultaneous explosions blew out any remaining glass in the downstairs windows and halfway knocked him to the ground, but he kept running until he, too, reached the car.

By this time, Nolan was back in the driver's seat, breathing hard, starting the thing up. Over his shoulder, he yelled up at Evan. "That was the place all right. That Ahmad is okay. Must have been a dozen Muj in there, dude, maybe two hundred AKs. RPGs, you name it. But nothing that a few frag grenades couldn't cure. God, I love this work. How 'bout you? Was that fun or what? Hang on, we're rolling."

Behind him, fire and smoke were beginning to billow out of the building's windows. Evan couldn't take his eyes off the spectacle. He was vaguely aware of doors opening on the street around him, people pouring out into the night, more shouts, the screams of women. Behind them now, he heard the crack of what he imagined must be gunfire, but he saw nothing distinctly enough to consider it a target.

But then they had turned the corner and were headed back through the space in front of the mosque, then the marketplace. Evan swallowed against the dryness in his throat, his stomach knotted up inside him, his knuckles burning white on the handles of his machine gun.

8

A WHILE AFTER MIDNIGHT, Evan tried to carefully and quietly navigate the three steps up to the dorm trailer. Between the news from home about Tara and his involvement in the raid, he figured he had every excuse in the world to split most of a bottle of Allstrong's Glenfiddich with Nolan after they returned to BIAP, and now the ground was shifting pretty well under him. He was looking forward to lying down on his cot. Tomorrow he'd try to process most or all of what he'd been through tonight, the aftermath.

He and his reservists had worked it out with the Filipino cooks and clerical staff and now had a dorm section of their own, eight cots in a double-wide bedroom. When he pushed open the door, the greeting was like a surprise party without anybody yelling surprise.

Suddenly all the lights went on, and these nearly blinded him, especially in his inebriated state. Stumbling backward against the brightness, his hands up in front of his eyes, he might have tripped on the steps and fallen back out of the trailer if one of his guys, Alan Reese, hadn't been waiting there to grab him.

As the glare faded, Evan blinked himself into some recognition. Facing him, some sitting on their cots, some standing, was his squadron. Marshawn Whitman, his sergeant and second-in-command, much to Evan's surprise, was standing at attention and even offered a legitimate salute before he began with a formality he'd never used before. "Lieutenant," he said, "we all need to have a talk."

Evan tried to focus so that he only saw one Marshawn, instead of two, looming there in front of him. He put a hand out against the doorjamb to hold himself steady. His tongue, too big for his mouth in any case, could only manage the word "Now?"

"Now would be best," Whitman said. "We need to get out of here."

"Where to?"

"Back to our unit."

"Our unit? How we gonna do that?"

"We don't know, Lieutenant. But being here just isn't right."

Evan, stalling for time, looked over first at Reese standing next to him, then around to Levy and Jefferson and Onofrio sitting forward on their cots, identical triplets-elbows on their thighs, hands clasped in front of them-and finally to Pisoni and Koshi and Fields, who were standing with their arms crossed, leaning against the wall. Whatever this was about, these guys were a unit, all of them in it together. And from the looks of them, all of them angry.

"Guys," Evan said, "it's not like we got a choice. They sent us here."

"Well, not really. They sent us up to Baghdad, then we wound up here."

"I'm not sure I see the difference, Marsh."

Corporal Gene Pisoni, a sandy-haired, sweet-tempered mechanic for a Honda dealership in Burlingame, and the youngest member of the squad, cleared his throat. "We could get shot at doing what we're doing here, is the difference, sir. They shot up this base today. We've just been lucky out in the streets up until now."

Next to Evan, Reese piped in. "The casualty figures posted today list a hundred and sixteen dead this last week in Baghdad alone. Our luck can't hold much longer."

Lance Corporal Ben Levy, a law student at Santa Clara, added to the refrain. "We've been here almost a month, sir. This was supposed to be a temporary assignment, wasn't it?"