Betrayal

"Alan!" Evan yelled to Reese. "Get around here on this side!"

Reese looked at him over the Humvee's hood and nodded. Turning, still firing his sidearm at the rooftops on his side, he made it nearly to the back side of the car before several more automatic rounds straightened him up, threw him up against the car's body, and dropped him out of Evan's sight.

His own gun drawn, Evan sat next to Fields's crumpled body on the pavement in the partial cover of the Humvee. Up to his left, he could make out a couple of running figures at the edges of the roofline, but Nolan was doing a decent job of keeping them down, stippling the fronts of the buildings they occupied, holding their fire to a minimum. But Nolan was the only machine gunner left and at his firing rate, he would soon be out of ammunition.

Evan nudged at Fields. "C'mon, buddy, we've got to move." He pushed at Fields's shoulder again and the man's body slumped all the way to the side on the ground, the front of his shirt soaked in red. Another burst of machine-gun fire shattered the air directly behind him, and Evan turned and saw that it was his own #3 Humvee, Nolan on the roof, coming around in the street and running its own screen between the buildings to cover him.

But he had three men down here at the #1 Humvee, and three more in #2. He could only guess at Reese's condition. Perhaps he'd only been wounded. He'd have to get around the Humvee here to check that out. And then still there were Koshi, Jefferson, and Levy, over in #2. He'd have to order Nolan and Onofrio to help him load the dead and wounded into the backseat and cargo area of the one working Humvee. He couldn't leave his men out here in the street.

It wasn't possible that he'd lost so many of them in so short a time.

And then his own Humvee pulled up, the back door open, Onofrio behind the wheel, frantically gesturing that he should jump aboard, screaming at him although Evan could barely hear him. It was his only chance, their only chance.

But here was Fields right at his side, bleeding to death if not already dead. There was no option but to try to get him in the car first.

"There's no time!" Nolan yelled down from the roof at Onofrio. "Keep driving! Go! Go! Go!" He fired a short volley up into the rooflines. "Move!"

It seemed like Nolan was urging-ordering!-Onofrio to save themselves and abandon Evan with the rest of the men. But his driver slowed the vehicle as it came abreast of Evan, looked over in panic and desperation, reached out a hand across the seat.

Nolan yelled from the roof. "Leave 'em, leave 'em, there's no time! They're gone!"

The Humvee stopped now, and Onofrio leaned over further and pushed open the passenger door, his hand outstretched. Evan reached around, trying to get ahold of Fields to pull him along. Getting a purchase on his squadmate's sleeve, Evan was halfway to his feet, his own free hand out to Onofrio's, when, deep in his bowels, he felt again the low hum of another incoming RPG.

It was the last thing he felt for eleven days.

PART TWO. 2003-2004

9

FROM RON NOLAN'S PERSPECTIVE, there was just no benefit to staying in Iraq and talking about it.

The inquiry into the incident looked like it was going to be a tricky thing. Onofrio was the only witness left in the immediate aftermath, and Nolan believed that his testimony wouldn't be harmful. Onofrio had been busy driving and wouldn't have had a clue about whether the following car was in fact stationary when Nolan had opened fire on it. But the word from the street, the result of Jack Allstrong's reaching out to the local Iraqi and U.S. military cops, had already filtered back about what had actually happened, and there was a reasonable chance that Nolan would be arrested.

The good news was that the Abu Ghraib scandal had just surfaced, and every American remotely connected to law enforcement in Iraq had been assigned to that investigation. Even Major Charles Tucker, that pain-in-the-ass bean-counter who'd been constantly in their shit about money, found himself reassigned to that scandal.

But in spite of that, and though he knew that jurisdictional issues were problematic at best in Iraq, especially when they involved contractors accused of criminal activity such as, in this case, murder, Nolan was unwilling to risk his own arrest. You never knew what could happen then. The CPA might decide to use him as an example for other trigger-happy contractors, or give him to the Iraqi prosecutors, both nonstarters from Nolan's point of view.