Betrayal

The street had first seemed to go eerily silent, but already now as he all but fell out of the car, Evan became aware of the upswell of volume that was growing around them. Back behind them, on the sidewalk, a man was screaming, keening, and there appeared to be a form down on the sidewalk next to him-one or more of Nolan's bullets had apparently hit a bystander as he or she was walking down the street. This was perhaps unavoidable once the shooting started, but it aggravated the situation terribly.

A man on the curb was yelling at him in English. "He was stopping! He was stopping!" Back at the shot-up sedan, Fields and Reese on the other side, Evan approached with great caution. Although the windshield was blown out and red streaks tinted the inside of the other windows, someone might still be armed and alive inside, or there might still be an unexploded bomb.

Evan came up to the passenger door, gingerly pulled it open, then spoke into the radio to Pisoni. "Gene. Get through to somebody somewhere and tell them about this. Give 'em our location and tell 'em we need support yesterday. Anything they can get to us."

Behind him, he became aware of more shouts, randomly laced with fury. He turned his attention to the body-a woman, judging by the bloodied shreds of the niqab, or veil, that now stuck to what had been her face. Now she sprawled partially out of the front seat, her upper body bleeding into the street. On the other side of the car, Fields had opened the back door and stepped back in disgust and horror. "Holy shit, Ev, there's kids back here."

A minute later, the first of the rocks hit his Humvee.

***

FOR PERHAPS TEN MINUTES, though it seemed more like an hour, Evan tried to direct events, even through the bombardment of projectiles that the entire convoy was beginning to endure. He gave his machine gunners, including and especially Nolan, strict orders not to fire into the crowd. He hoped that the reinforcements that Pisoni had called for would arrive in something like a timely manner, and he entertained the hope that this wouldn't escalate further, at least until the cavalry showed up.

But he couldn't keep the crowd from closing in around the white sedan, some members of it clearly recognizing the family that Nolan had just slaughtered. As Evan and his men retreated back to their own bunched-up vehicles, they heard from Pisoni that Iraqi police units, stationed nearby, were on their way.

Meanwhile, though, some of the crowd members had laid down blankets in the street and begun the process of removing the bodies from the car. First the woman, then her husband, who'd been behind the wheel, finally the three children-by the size of them, none older than six or seven. All of them were badly bloodied, but one was apparently still breathing, and someone grabbed that child and disappeared with it into the crowd.

Nolan, still up behind his gun, now had his eyes on the street in front of them, which had cleared as the forward traffic had begun to move. "Evan," he said, and when Scholler looked up, he pointed. "Check it out."

Evan turned. "What?"

"We're good to go, dude."

"What are you talking about? We're not going anywhere. We've got a multiple fatality incident here, Ron. We stay till we're cleared."

"Bad idea, Lieutenant. We go while we can. These people will take care of their own, but we'd best be gone by the time word gets out around here."

"We can't be gone. We've got to report-"

"Report? To the local cops? And then what? No, man, what we've got to do is get out of here now, while we can, before it gets ugly and personal."

"Personal with us?"

"We killed 'em, Lieutenant."

"We didn't kill 'em, Nolan. You killed 'em."

"So split a straw. They're not gonna care. We're on the same side, is all that matters. This is a clan culture, so everybody in these poor fuckers' clan is honor bound to kill us. It's going to get personal in about two minutes, I promise."

Evan looked off down the street at the still-receding line of traffic that had been blocking their way all morning. Behind them, the horns of a hundred other cars urged him to drive off, clear the road, get out of the way. He didn't know how he could in any kind of conscience leave the scene of an incident such as this one-all his police training went against it. There would have to be an investigation, photographs, testimony taken. They couldn't just see an opportunity to get away and run from all this, could they?

From across the car, Fields said, "I think Mr. Nolan's right, sir. We've got to get out of here. We get back to an FOB someplace." Fields was picking up the jargon. An FOB was a secure troop area, or forward operating base, with Bremer walls, crew-served weapons, and security checkpoints. "We make our report out of there."

Evan didn't respond and instead went to his radio. "Gene," he said, "what's it look like for getting out of here?"

"When?"

"Right now."

"Decent. There's an off-road to a barricade point another quarter mile up, and I can-"