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?"
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.
By now, most of the routes in and out of the city had been barricaded off and access to those thoroughfares was nominally under the control of the CPA and Iraqi police/military units. All vehicles had to pass at least one and often several checkpoints to be admitted to these streets. Unfortunately, the inner city was a cobweb of smaller streets that fed into the larger main roads, and access to these was much more difficult to control. A convoy like Scholler's would be sitting in traffic downtown, essentially stationary, and a car with four Iraqis in it would suddenly appear out of one of these alleys and begin crowding the convoys in the slowly moving endless line of traffic.
Since many of these cars were in fact SV-BEDs, they, too, ignored escalation of the hand and audio signals in their efforts to get close enough to destroy the convoys they'd targeted. And of course, in these cases, the machine gunners standing through the roofs of the Humvees in the convoys had little option, if they wanted to save their own lives, but to open fire on the approaching vehicle.
Tragically, though, all too often the approaching car held innocent Arabic-speaking Iraqi civilians who simply didn't understand the English commands to back off, or the simple Arabic commands soldiers had been taught to give to help with the confusion. Or they failed to appreciate the urgency of the hand signals. In the first months after the occupation of Baghdad, these shooting "mistakes" had come to account for ninety-seven percent of the civilian deaths in the city-far more than the deaths caused by all the insurgents, IEDs, sniper fire, and suicide bombers combined. If a car got too close to a convoy, it was going to get shot up. That was the reality.
***
NOLAN, scheduled for the rear car this Tuesday with Evan, picked right up on the bad vibe that had been riding along with Scholler's squadron for the past few days. Now, as he walked up to the convoy, he was somewhat surprised to see Evan outside his vehicle, having some words with one of his men, Greg Fields. Tony Onofrio, another of the guys, was standing by listening, obviously uncomfortable.
"Because I say so," Evan was saying, "that's why."
"That ain't cutting it, Lieutenant. I've been up there three days in a row. How about we put Tony on the gun today?" Fields was obviously talking about the machine gunner's spot, the main target popping out of the roof of their Humvee.
"Tony's a better driver than you are, Greg, and you're better on the gun, so that's not happening. Mount up."
But Fields didn't move.
Nolan had been aware that the unit's respect for Evan's leadership had declined over their recreational drinking coupled with Evan's inability to get them transferred, and now it looked as though Fields might flatly refuse his lieutenant's direct order. So he stepped into the fray. "Hey, hey, guys. No sweat. I'll take the gun. Greg, you hop in the back seat and chill a while."
Nolan knew that the men might also be mad about his own role in Evan's drinking, plus driving him all over to hell and gone, but figured that neither as a group nor individually could they resent him if he took a turn in the roof. Although this was technically forbidden.
Caught in the middle, Evan felt that he had to assert his authority. "I can't let you do that, Ron."
"Sure you can." He gestured toward the machine gun. "I'm a master on that mother."
"I'm sure you are," Evan said, "but you're only allowed to use a sidearm."
Flashing the smile he used to disarm, Nolan stepped up and whispered into Evan's face. "Dude, the other night ring a bell? That's not your rule. That's the recommendation for contractors. Nothing to do with you. I'm betting Fields has no objection." He turned. "That right, son?"
The young man didn't hesitate for an instant. "Absolutely."
"Fields isn't the issue," Evan said, even as the guys from the other Humvees were moving down in their direction, wondering what the beef was about.
"I'm the issue to me, Lieutenant," Fields said. "It ain't right, me being up there every day. If Mr. Nolan wants a turn, I say tell him thanks and let's roll out of here."
Evan didn't want this to escalate in front of his other men. Nolan was throwing him a lifeline that could save his authority and preserve some respect in front of his squad. And maybe what he said was true. Maybe it was a rule for contractors, and none of the Army's business.
"All right," Evan said at last, lifting a finger at Fields. "This one time, Greg."
***
NOW EVAN and his very disgruntled guys were in a Baghdad neighborhood called Masbah, where Nolan was to meet up and conduct some business with a tribal chief who was a friend of Kuvan. They'd already passed the checkpoint into the wide main thoroughfare that was now choked with traffic. On either side, storefronts gave way to tall buildings. Pedestrians skirted sidewalk vendors who spilled over into the roadway on both sides of the road.
But in contrast to many of their other trips through the city, today they'd encountered quite a bit of low-level hostility. Kids who, even a week before, had run along beside the convoy begging for candy, today hung back and in a few cases pelted the cars with rocks and invective as they drove by. Older "kids," indistinguishable in many ways from the armed and very dangerous enemy, tended to gather in small groups and watch the passage of the cars in surly silence. The large and ever-growing civilian death toll from quick-triggered convoy machine gunners-in Evan's view, often justifiable, if tragic-was infecting the general populace. And in a tribal society such as Iraq 's, where the death of a family member must be avenged by the whole tribe, Evan felt that at any time the concentric circles of retribution might extend to them-all politics and military exigencies aside.
Riding along with Nolan on the big gun above him, Evan was more than nervous. He honestly didn't know his duty. He hadn't been briefed on this exact situation and had no ranking officer above him to tell him the rules. Should he have stood up to Nolan and forbade him to man the machine gun, alienating himself from his men even more? Could he just continue to let him ride up there and hope the problem would go away? But playing into all of his ruminations was the fact that since the unauthorized raid into the BIAP neighborhood, everything about Nolan had him on edge.
The more Evan reflected on it, the less defensible that attack seemed, the more like some variant of murder. Evan had been a cop long enough in civilian life that he was sensitive to the nuances of homicide, and the raid had certainly been at the very least in a dark gray area. If the house that Nolan and his Gurkhas had trashed had in fact been identified as a legitimate military target, shouldn't it have been a military unit that took care of it? Though it was possible that the house full of AK-47s and other ordnance could have been an insurgent stronghold, Evan couldn't shake the thought that the attack might have been more in the line of a personal reprisal-payback to one of Ahmad's (or Kuvan's) enemies, or even to a business competitor.
Now, stuck in traffic in the passenger seat on a sweltering morning in Masbah, and still hung over from the previous night's beers, Evan tried to get his thoughts in order. He had to figure out a way to get his troops out of this assignment; he had to stop drinking every night with Nolan; he had to accept that it was over with Tara; he had to get a plan for his life when he got out of here.
He closed his eyes against the constant dull awful throbbing. In the driver's seat, Tony Onofrio must have caught his moment of weakness, because he turned the music way up to a painful decibel level-Toby Keith's new hit "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)." This was Tony's not-so-subtle punishment for the fact that Evan hadn't succeeded in getting them transferred yet. The other beautiful aspect of the earsplitting volume was that Evan couldn't acknowledge that it bothered him-to do so would be admitting to his hangover. Tony, of course, knew he had the hangover. The message was clear enough-if Evan could jeopardize all of their safety putting more priority on drinking than on getting them out of here, then Tony could play his goddamned music as loud as he fucking wanted.
But suddenly, all the cogitations became moot. They were moving along at about ten miles per hour and they had just passed a side street when Nolan slapped three times rapidly onto the hood of their vehicle. "Heads up," he yelled down with real urgency, "bogey at ten o'clock. Ten o'clock."
Instantly jarred alert-this was a situation Evan had been trained for-Evan hit his radio and passed the word up to the rest of his squadron. "Pisoni! Gene, any way to speed up?" Then he yelled at Nolan. "Hand-signals first, Ron. Back ' em off. Back 'em off!"
From the radio, he heard, "Negative, sir. We're stuck up here."
Nolan shouted, "Comin' on."
"Don't fire! Repeat, do not fire."
He knew that he had to see how serious the threat was before he could formulate his response. If nothing else, he needed to make sure that this encounter went by the rules of engagement, the escalated warning process. But on the other hand if it was a suicide bomber who had targeted them, it would happen quickly and he couldn't be afraid to pull the trigger. He drew his own sidearm, the 9mm Baretta M9, and, turning half-around in his seat, stuck his head out the window. Behind them, just out of the alley and pulling out ahead of the backed-up traffic in the space behind them, was a beat-up white sedan with no license plates. The rear car in all of the convoys already sported relatively large signs, written in English and Arabic, warning following vehicles to leave at least one hundred feet of space, and experienced drivers in Baghdad tended to err on the side of caution. And yet this car had entered the roadway at about seventy-five feet and was advancing.
Looking up, Evan saw that Nolan had drawn himself up to full height and was standing with both arms extended, palms out-the classic "stay-back" signal in any language. Trying to get a better glimpse of the car behind them, Evan stuck his body out even farther. With the sun beating down on the windshield, the view inside the vehicle was generally obscured, but Evan was fairly certain that he could make out two people in the front seats. The back window on his side was down as well, and he caught a glimpse of forearm for a moment, instantly retracted.
"There's three of 'em in there at least," he called up to Nolan. Then, into the radio again, "Gene, can you get to the side and go around? The sidewalk, even?"
"Clogged up, sir. Negative. In fact, slowing."
"Shit." Evan knew that they had a megawatt flashlight in the backseat for just this situation. He pulled himself back in and told Greg Fields, behind the driver's seat-who should have been up where Nolan was-to find it and shine it at the approaching driver's face. It was supposed to be for nighttime use, but it might do some good during the day as well.
Digging in his duty bag on the floor at his feet, Evan pulled out the airhorn klaxon they carried for just such a moment. Amazingly enough, it seemed that even this many months into the occupation, some people-even whole families-would simply take to the streets in their cars to go shopping or run an errand. They'd get to talking or arguing and never see the warning hand signals until it was too late.
Coming out the window again, airhorn in his hand, Evan looked quickly to the roof. Nolan had gotten down out of his extended position and now his palms were gripped around the handles of the machine gun. "Hold off, Nolan! Hold off! Wait for my order!"
The car had closed to under forty feet in ten seconds, and seemed to be accelerating. Like everywhere else in the civilized world, Iraq seemed to raise drivers who abhorred a vacuum between vehicles. Even in the bright sunshine, even with the glare off the windshield, Evan could see that Fields had trained his blinding light on the driver. From his own side, he held out the airhorn and let out a blast.
The radio squawked out. "Deadlock up here, sir. Slowing down."
Evan checked the position of the approaching car-was it, too, slowing down at last? Good, it had stopped in time, thank God. This crisis would pass. He reckoned that he had time for a quick look ahead of them. Turning, he was about to order Pisoni onto the sidewalk-the pedestrians would have to scatter and that was just too damn bad. Onofrio hit the brakes and they came to a complete stop.
All was still. Evan breathed a sigh of great relief.
And then, with a maniacal war whoop, right above him, Ron Nolan opened fire.
***
THE CAR DID NOT EXPLODE.
That alone was enough to cause Evan grave concern. That and the fact that in the seconds before Nolan had started shooting, the car had finally gotten the frantic message from the lights and airhorns and without a doubt had come to a complete halt. Only after the first hail of bullets had slammed into it had it started moving again-the dead driver's foot letting up its pressure on the brakes?-coming on, actually faster now, with Nolan continually pouring rounds into it, until it rammed into the back of Evan's car and shuddered to a stop.
"Don't leave the cars unattended!" Evan tried to keep his rising panic out of his voice. "Stay at the wheel! Man your guns! Who's riding shotgun in your car, Gene? Well, get Reese back here with us. Fields," he yelled at his assistant driver, "out with me!"
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-"
At that moment, a low hum filled the torpid air around them. Nolan yelled out, "RPG. Down!" And sixty feet from where Evan stood, the first Humvee suddenly exploded in a ball of flame, knocking him, Fields, and Reese to the pavement. Nearly deafened, Evan still registered that Nolan had come up out of his crouch and turned his machine gun to the building from which he believed the rocket-propelled grenade had been fired.
Gene Pisoni and Marshawn Whitman had just taken a direct hit that they couldn't have survived. Across the hood of Evan's own Humvee, Reese stood back into his view, the left half of his face awash in blood. He was trying to say something, motioning to Evan, but either he wasn't saying any words or Evan couldn't hear them through the deafening roar in his head. Fields, too, finally got to his feet, apparently unharmed, and pointed to the Humvee, then to the empty street yawning open before them, in an unambiguous gesture. It was past time for talking about it. They had to get out of there.
He was right. Now the second and third Humvees were open targets-possibly saved, Evan later realized, by their proximity to the white sedan or to the crowd that had initially gathered around it. But that wasn't any part of his consideration as he pointed Reese to the second Humvee and hopped into the third one just as a spray of bullets pinged off the street in front of them all, cutting across the hood of his vehicle. Nolan wheeled and fired into the buildings again.
Onofrio had his vehicle in gear and started forward. In the second Humvee just in front of them, Reese reached the open passenger door and half jumped, half fell inside, joining Levy, Koshi, and Davy Jefferson-a twenty-four-year-old In-N-Out manager from Sunnyvale-who was stationed on the machine gun. And perhaps because of fear, or maybe an understood complicity among the locals, Evan noticed the crowd had suddenly fallen back from around them, isolating them as targets even further. Up out of the roof of the Humvee in front of them, Davy Jefferson had opened fire at some rooflines as well.
Another spray of bullets kicked at the street between the two vehicles. Over Evan's head, Nolan fired another burst, which was followed closely by a terrifyingly close low humming vibration as another RPG somehow missed them and exploded into a storefront over on their left. Glass and stucco dust rained down over them.
Evan hit his driver's arm and pointed to the burned-out, still smoking remains of their #1 vehicle. He still could barely hear himself, although he was yelling. "Gene and Marsh! Gene and Marsh!" Telling Onofrio he wasn't going to leave his dead men behind to be mutilated by the mob, which was the way this scenario looked like it was starting to develop.
They pulled around next to their #2 Humvee and at Evan's signal, he and Fields jumped out into the street again. Evan motioned to Nolan and Jefferson, on the two still-working guns, to cover them as they ran to the destroyed, still smoking #1 Humvee. Whitman's charred and bloodied body had been blown clear out of his hole by the machine gun and now lay sprawled over the roof. Evan and Fields grabbed their fallen comrade by the arms and pulled him down, then began dragging him as fast as they could back to their vehicle.
For a few seconds, the firing ceased. Evan and Fields managed to load Whitman's body into the back of their car, then they turned and went to join Alan Reese, who had come out of the #2 Humvee and was trying to open the front doors to the first car and get Pisoni out. But the doors were still too hot to touch, as well as sealed shut. The windows, of course, had all been destroyed by the blast as well, so Fields leaned in on the driver's side and tried to get some purchase on Pisoni's lifeless body, but couldn't get it to budge.
"He's still got his seat belt on!" he called back.
The force of the grenade had all but knocked the back door on the driver's side off its hinges, and Evan was able to force it further open with a few kicks. They could get Pisoni out that way. Evan got Fields over next to him, put his shoulder to it, and had just started to push when more rounds of automatic weapons fire exploded from the roofs around them. Fields, at his elbow, made a sickening guttural sound, then spun around and collapsed to the ground in a sitting position.
On the other side of the car, Reese fired off a few useless rounds with his sidearm just as heavy automatic weapons fire began coming from the roofs of buildings on Reese's side of the street as well. Somewhere behind them, Nolan was firing continuously now, back and forth, side to side, from the roof of his vehicle, but when Evan looked over, hoping he might be able to direct some covering fire from the other Humvee, he saw that Davy Jefferson had disappeared and that bullet holes had pocked across the #2 windshield as well. If Levy and Koshi hadn't been hit in their front seats, it was a miracle.
"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.