I awoke with the sun in my eyes. My watch said 1143, more than five hours since we’d left Sinjar. We’d been traveling overland through the Jazira and were making a final piss stop. The horizon was flat and brown in every direction, as if we were marooned on another planet. There might be the occasional Bedouin or Shammari, the bandit tribe of the Jazira, but otherwise no one ever came into this unforgiving desert. We were safely alone.
Boon attended to Marhaz. The hard pounding of off-road travel wasn’t good for a pregnant woman. Earlier, Boon had rigged a makeshift hammock for her in the back of the Humvee, but it could absorb only so much of the rough travel. Fortunately there was no blood, and the baby was restless, or so Marhaz thought. Boon couldn’t feel her moving, but that wasn’t unusual. Farhan looked distraught. Many men can be trained to assassinate, but most still fall apart over the birth of their child.
“Where are we?” I asked Boon.
He handed me the binoculars. “South of Baiji,” he said, and I could smell it. Baiji was an oil town.
We had traveled 120 kilometers through the desert, avoiding human settlements. The Jazira was hard-packed desert with chunks of rock, not the flowing dunes of the Sahara, but it was still a slow and bouncy route. Marhaz, resting in her makeshift hammock, must have been nauseous, at least. Most of us were.
Girl’s got grit, I thought.
“That’s our objective,” Boon said, pointing toward the east. Camp Speicher lay on the horizon, in all its containerized-housing-unit, Hesco-barrier, chain-link-fenced glory. The place was no “camp” but a mammoth former American military base, thirty-six square kilometers large. Now it straddled the front line between ISIS, Iraqi, and Iranian forces, plus your random bandit tribes bunkering oil from the nearby refineries. It was a deeply unsafe place, but for us, it was cover.
“Plan?” I asked Boon, thankful that he had taken charge while I caught a quick nap. A week ago, I wouldn’t have expected it, but since he’d stolen Kylah from me . . . Okay, since I’d found out he’d won Kylah’s approval, I’d begun to realize Boon had the quiet authority of a natural leader.
He spread out the laminated map on the Humvee’s hood. “Here’s Speicher,” he said, pointing to a huge square with a felt-tip marker. “According to the Kurds, ISIS holds the center, near the runways. The southeast is held by Shia militia. They’ve been fighting since July. We need to get to the northeast corner, but ISIS patrols the perimeter, except the southern border. We run into a patrol, we’re dead.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Once we’re spotted, more will come.”
Boon frowned at the map. “The south is less guarded than the north, but we’d have to cut through miles of base. No telling what’s in there. Even the Kurds don’t know for sure. Could be tens, hundreds, thousands of militants.”
“I don’t like it. No go.”
“That leaves the northeast corner,” Boon said.
“The main entrance?” Wildman said, hovering nearby. That was always his favorite tactic: frontal assault.
“Not quite,” I said. “There’s a few entrances, here, here, and here.” I pointed to the map. “Take the first available.”
“We won’t make it,” Boon said.
He was right. The highway ran along that section of the base. It would be impossible to sneak up there. We’d be spotted for sure.
“We creep as close as we can get to the northern edge,” I said, “then take the hardball and make a dash.”
Wildman nodded. Boon looked unconvinced. So was I. It was the least worst option.
“Mount up,” I said. Wildman took up the fifty-cal in his vehicle. I took ours.
“Radio check, over,” I said through my headset.
“Lima Charlie,” replied Wildman, Boon, and my driver in succession.
“This is starting to be like Mad Max,” Boon grumbled, as we powered up the diesels.
“Iraq’s a postapocalyptic world,” I said. That was half true; ISIS was trying to destroy the other half.
We sped through the desert toward the massive base. I looked ahead and saw a berm topped with a barbed wire fence stretching far into the desert. Speicher. “Shots fired!” Boon said. Wildman began shooting his fifty-cal, and I followed the tracers. Six ISIS technicals were coming at us from our one o’clock.
“Fan out,” I said, and my driver swerved next to Boon. Now two Humvees were facing the ISIS patrol. I unloaded the fifty-cal, and so did Wildman, but we were bouncing so much in the desert we couldn’t target effectively, and neither could they.
“Hardtop!” Boon yelled. The Humvee bounced hard as we hit the paved road, and tires squealed as an old Toyota Corolla was forced off the edge. Inside, a mother, father, and three young girls stared at us as we passed.
I waited until the ISIS vehicles were in closer range before I unleashed.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. The fifty sounded like a jackhammer. I fired again. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.
Bits of metal flew off the nearest ISIS technical, but it didn’t slow. The Hummer jerked as a tractor trailer truck approached us head-on, blowing its horn. We swerved off-road, ruining my shot, but ten seconds later the ISIS pursuers had passed it and I unloaded again. Wildman did the same from his Humvee, battering the road, and together we forced our pursuers to fall back.
“Faster,” I yelled, pounding the Humvee’s roof above the driver’s head. Speicher’s perimeter fence whizzed by our right, the Humvees redlining at seventy mph.
Wild ISIS fire raked past us into oncoming traffic. A car’s windshield imploded in machine-gun rounds and the sedan spun out of control, our Humvees narrowly dodging it. The g-force threw me against the rim of the turret.
“Two klicks out,” Boon said, as a second car’s engine block took direct hits and black smoke billowed from under its hood. A third car steered off the road, but I saw its chassis catch on a rock, ripping its suspension apart at speed.
“The first entrance is coming up on our right,” I yelled over the slipstream and the hammering of my fifty-cal.
“Roger,” Boon replied over the headset.
“Do not take it. Copy?”
“Copy.”
“Look for a breach in the wall, two hundred meters past the entrance.”
The chain-link fence turned to a concrete wall, as the tank ditch disappeared. We sped past the front gate as my fifty-cal started clicking, out of ammo. Faded American and Iraqi flags were painted on the wall, with “Welcome to Camp Speicher” written underneath. Two bewildered Iraqi soldiers stood to watch us pass, then were gunned down by the ISIS technicals.
“Do you see the hole?”
“Roger, I see it.”
“Punch through.”
Our vehicles fishtailed off the road, and the six ISIS pickups followed. Ahead of us was a three-meter gap in the concrete wall.
“We are not going to fit!” yelled my driver.
“We will fit!” I yelled back, bracing myself.
Boon’s Hummer smashed into the gap, sending up a plume of concrete dust. I ducked as we charged into the cloud, chunks of concrete bouncing off our bulletproof windshield. The hole was a meter wider.
“Hold your fire!” I yelled as we emerged on the other side and the technical, flying a black ISIS flag, leapt through the hole. “Wildman, hold your fire! Boon, get us out of here!”
“Yes sir,” he yelled, as the ground behind us erupted in automatic gunfire and RPGs tore through the ISIS vehicles as they came through the breach. The technical with the black flag exploded, a direct hit from an antitank rocket. The following vehicle’s tires were shredded by bullets, followed by its cab. An RPG hit the third technical, flipping it and exploding. The next vehicle swerved to avoid it. A fifty-cal sniper round blew a hole through the windshield and out the back, killing the driver. Machine-gun fire perforated the Toyota a second later. The fifth technical was raked by precision gunfire: driver’s head, tires, engine block, gunners. I saw a militant leap from his vehicle, sprinting for cover, but a sniper put him down. The last technical turned sharply to escape, but it was far too late; a crew-served machine gun tore it to bits.
Silence.
The ambush was over as quickly as it had begun. Only smoke, the sound of flames, and the smell of gunpowder remained.
“Pull over, Boon,” I said.
He did. We were on the edge of the kill zone, but nothing was moving. No survivors. I looked at the buildings around us, but they were empty, as silent as the rest of the world. Then silhouettes emerged from the landscape. Snipers on the roofs, machine-gun teams in windows, RPG gunners around corners. Twenty in all, weapons pointing at us, a big burly son of a bitch with a shaved head walking point.
“You told me you’d be coming in hot,” Bear said, “but goddamn!”