Betrayal

Evan still felt the room swaying under him, but part of him was sobering up. "Well, first, our luck can hold, guys, if we just stay careful. But I'm not arguing with you. This isn't what we got sent over here for, I agree. I just don't know what we can do about it."

"Talk to Calliston." Nao Koshi was Japanese-American, a software engineer who'd been pulled out of what he'd thought was the world's best job at Google. "He assigned us here. He can assign us out."

"We shouldn't be doing this." A thick-necked Caltrans employee from Half Moon Bay, Anthony Onofrio was thirty-three years old. He had two young children and a pregnant wife at home. He was perennially the saddest guy in the group, but rarely spoke up to complain. Now, though, he continued. "This really is all fucked up, sir. They've got to have the trucks we're trained to fix at least down in Kuwait by now. We ought to be down there doing what we're trained to do, not standing up behind machine guns."

"I agree with you, Tony. You think I want to be here? But I thought you guys were happy to have regular quarters, regular meals."

"The guys we came over with," Marshawn said, "they've probably got that by now, too, wherever they are. Maybe better than we got it here. We're all willing to risk it. Huh, guys?"

A general hum of affirmation went around the room.

"Bottom line, Ev," Whitman continued, "is what Tony said. Us going out in these packages every day is just bullshit. We don't want to die driving Jack Allstrong or Ron Nolan around to pick up money."

"Nobody does, Marsh. I don't either."

"Well, the way it's going now," Whitman said, "it's only a matter of time."

Evan shook his head in an effort to clear it, then wiped a palm down the front of his face. "You guys are right. I'm sorry. I'll talk to Calliston, see what I can do. At least get things moving, if I can."

"Sooner would be better," Pisoni said. "I got a bad feeling about this. Things over here are heating up too fast. It's only going to get worse."

"I'm on it, Gene," Evan said. "Promise. First chance I get. Tomorrow, if he's around."

"Oh, and sir," Whitman added. "It might be better, when you get to see Calliston, if you were sober. He'll take the request more seriously. No offense."

"No," Evan said. "Of course. None taken. You guys are right."

***

AS IT TURNED OUT, Colonel Calliston did not have a free seventeen seconds, much less fifteen minutes, that he felt obligated to devote to the problems of a reserve lieutenant whose squadron was gainfully employed doing meaningful work for one of the CPA's major contractors. Finally, Evan took the guys' beef to Nolan, who listened with apparent sympathy to the men's position and promised to bring the matter up with Allstrong, who in turn would try to make a pitch to Calliston. But, like everything else in Iraq, it was going to be a time-consuming, lengthy process that might never show results anyway. Nolan suggested that, in the meanwhile, Evan's squadron might want to write to the commander of their reserve unit, or to some of their colleagues in that unit, wherever they happened to be in the war theater.

In the few days while these discussions and negotiations were transpiring, things in Baghdad -bad enough to begin with-became substantially worse, especially for the convoys. One of the KBR convoys delivering several tons of dinars in cash from Baghdad to BIAP was ambushed just outside of the city and barely limped into the compound with one dead and four wounded. The lead vehicle's passenger-side window was blown out, and the doors and bumpers sported dozens of bullet holes. The attack had been a coordinated effort between a suicide-vehicle-borne explosive device-an SV-BED-and insurgents firing from rooftops. The consensus was that the damage could have been much worse, but the Marines in the convoy had shot up the suicide vehicle and killed its driver before he had gotten close enough to do more significant damage.

Earlier in the week, another convoy manned by DynaCorp contract personnel had shot out the windshield of the Humvee carrying the Canadian ambassador as a passenger, when his car hadn't responded to a warning to stay back. Luckily, in that incident, because the contractors had used rubber bullets, no one was badly hurt. But nerves were frayed everywhere, tempers short, traffic still insanely dense.