Excerpt from CI: TEAM RED

CHAPTER ONE

It was one of those days that started lousy and went rapidly downhill, beginning when DeLuca was called in to meet with Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Reicken in a conference room at the Tactical Operations Center for a briefing. The desert sun had yet to rise, but even at that pre-dawn hour the "TOC" was jamming, a fifty-foot square canvas enclosure ringed by armored transports and Bradley fighting vehicles backed up to form a protective cordon, the whole structure roofed with heavy dark green canvas tarps dating back to the Korean war, full of techies, aides, assistants, staff flunkies, translators and brigade combat team leaders, as well as a handful of DeLuca's fellow counterintelligence agents. He paused before entering to blouse his boots, because Reicken cared deeply about such things, grabbed a cup of coffee from the five gallon pot by the door, then made his way to the brightly lit room at the far end of the expansive hall, taking care not to trip over any of the cables duct-taped to the floor. The "Star Wars Tent," as some people were calling it, was always impressive to him, perhaps because he was something of a technophobe, with banks of computers crunching numbers and accessing databases, the latest communications equipment with satellite uplinks, electronics of all kinds, the walls alive with real time UAV imagery sent from drones no bigger than model airplanes, streaming 24/7 on an array of flat screen plasma televisions, the main screen a 4' x 6' job hanging at the far wall. A tech' officer had told him they had more computer power than NASA had when they put a man on the moon. DeLuca had been led to believe he was going to meet to discuss security needs for the day's mission. Instead, Reicken surprised him by throwing a crude wanted poster down on the table, a photocopy of a pencil drawing of DeLuca that, to his mind, wasn't all that close a resemblance, with the words "MR. Dave" and "$10,000 AMERICAN" and "CIA" written in inch-high block letters.

"Apparently you're a marked man, DeLuca," Reicken said with a kind of smirk on his face. "Looks like you're doing your job a bit too well. Take it as a compliment. Probably put out by some Ba'ath party poohbah who's getting tired of you arresting all his boys."

DeLuca picked up the drawing and looked at it. The drawing took a good fifteen or twenty years off of him. His hairline was wrong, his jaw a bit squarer, his nose not bent where an angel-dusted punk he'd arrested in Chelsea had broken it, and it wasn't an accurate enough rendering that anybody could pick him out of a crowd from it, but it gave him the willies all the same.

"Where'd you find this?" he asked. It would make a nice keepsake, assuming he got home in one piece. Something to frame for the study, assuming he still had a home, back in the world.

"Somebody brought it in," Reicken said casually. "You know, I wouldn't get a big head about it, but I think ten thousand may be a new record for a guardsman." Reicken hated guardsmen. Most of the guardsmen DeLuca knew found the feeling mutual. DeLuca had half a mind to call his old friend Phil - General Phillip LeDoux, to Reicken - and tell him what a horse's ass Reicken was, though that would be operating outside of channels, and he'd gotten in trouble for going outside channels on both his previous enlistments. DeLuca had known the general since the two of them had sat in a freezing cold Quonset hut on the German border back in the late seventies, listening to frantic East German government officials making telephone calls about how the Americans were going to call off the Olympics. DeLuca had joked, over the years, that Phillip only got into Officer's Candidate School because DeLuca turned them down. LeDoux was an excellent example of what good a man could do committing his life to the military. Reicken was a paper-pushing bureaucrat who couldn't carry LeDoux's shorts.

"Anyway," Reicken said, "I thought you should have a heads up. It's up to you if you want to go out or ride a desk for a few days until we find out who's doing this."

DeLuca decided not to react to the insult. As MacKenzie had told him before, "You're older than him, you're smarter than him, you're better looking and you're six inches taller than he is - he's totally jealous of you, and if you let him get to you, he pulls you down to his level." She was right, at least the part about not letting Reicken get to him.

"No thanks, but I'd appreciate it, Colonel, if we could keep this between ourselves for as long as possible. I wouldn't want to worry anybody on the team."

Two hours later, DeLuca was riding in an up-armored Humvee next to a man who apparently hadn't showered since the first Gulf War. They were fifteen klicks from base, headed for a compound on the outskirts of the town of Ad-Dujayl. The raiding party, operating out of the Balad Army Air Field, popularly known as Camp Anaconda, fifty kilometers north of Baghdad, consisted of three Bradley fighting vehicles and seven Humvees. Each Humvee carried five MP's, two in the front and two in the back, armed with M-16's and 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistols, and a Squad Automatic Weapon or SAW gunner protruding from a hole in the roof, seated in a canvas sling between the rear passengers with only his upper torso exposed, manning a roof-mounted M-60 machine gun. DeLuca reached across his flak jacket to check his revolver, hoping he wouldn't have to use it. He wasn't one of the gunslingers. Counterintelligence didn't do security. That's what the MPs and the Bradleys were for.

"Eyes on," he radioed to MacKenzie in the lead Humvee.

"Gotcha," she chirped back. "Too bad Doc' and Dan have to miss the party," she added, referring to the two other members of DeLuca's team, currently interviewing the mayor of Balad to see if he could explain why they'd found two hundred mortar rounds in the basement of the police station. It was called a THT, or Tactical Human-Intelligence Team, though sometimes he thought Strategic Human Intelligence Team might have made for a more apt acronym. He didn't like it when the team was split. They'd been working well together for months, and had started to anticipate each other's thoughts and needs. He'd said it a million times, beginning when he'd been the top instructor at Intelligence School at Ft. Huachuca: "Counterintelligence is a state of mind." Splitting the team disturbed the collective state of mind.

DeLuca thought about the wanted poster. Maybe he could turn it into a positive - having a little celebrity status might help, the next time he was negotiating with a sheik or tribal leader. MacKenzie had told him he was better looking than Reicken. Was that a flirt? Colleen was attractive, no question, but she was also twenty years his junior, and half the time, he pissed her off. Doc' was probably right. "Dave," he'd said, "if you knew half as much about women as you know about counterintelligence, your marriage wouldn't be in the trouble it's in."

"Is bad road," interrupted the man with a thick Arab accent sitting next to DeLuca. The man's name was Adnan, and he'd been with the battalion since they'd left Kuwait, an Iraqi exile and former Intelligence Service liaison with the Republican Guard who'd surrendered during the first gulf war, after Saddam Hussein's regime had killed his wife and family. He'd worked for the past ten years as a houseboy for a wealthy Kuwaiti family, but he'd jumped at a chance to go back as an informant. Adnan was filled with hatred for the regime, that was clear, but that didn't mean DeLuca trusted him.

"What?" DeLuca could hardly hear Adnan over the din of the Humvee's engine and the rocks and gravel pounding beneath the vehicle.

"Bad road," Adnan shouted again. "The people who live here are all thieves, I think."

DeLuca checked his weapons again. He was armed with a regulation 9mm fifteen round Beretta model 92S, which he carried in a "Mr. Mike" leg rig, but just in case, he also carried, in a shoulder holster, the same six inch stainless steel Smith and Wesson model 66 revolver, loaded with .357 magnum full-jacketed hollow points, that he'd carried during his twenty years on the Boston police force. He carried the revolver because he knew it worked, and because he had a relationship with the piece, a feeling something like, "We've done this before, and we can do it again."

"They're all bad roads," he told Adnan.

The countryside was actually rather lovely, the road lined with date palms and vineyards, and irrigation canals with their water pumps sounding a steady chik-chik-chik. Every house they passed made him nervous, because you never knew who was peeking from the windows, or what sort of arms they might be aiming at you.

"I am ready to die," Adnan said, more or less out of the blue.

"Oh yeah?" DeLuca said.

Adnan nodded.

"Well I'm not," DeLuca told him. "I'm still paying off a dining room set we got at Filene's."

DeLuca saw women picking crops under the hot sun, cultivating with hoes, swinging sickles, even wielding shovels to dig trenches while covered head to toe in full abayas, with only the faces of girls under twelve showing. He saw young boys in shorts or dishdashas herding goats or sheep. Everybody had ugly feet. It was nation of people with ugly feet.

"Commence waving and smiling everybody," he said into the radio. "Sunglasses off if you're looking at anybody. Pearly whites, front and center. Hug hug hug."

Two of the younger boys working in the field waved back at him. It was silly to a lot of people, to Doc' and to Dan in particular, but DeLuca firmly believed in presenting a friendly face to the people whose hearts and minds it was their task to win over. Getting tough only created more enemies, and as his mother used to say, "You catch more flies with sugar."

"I think you should ask the CIA for a raise," Adnan said. DeLuca operated "sterile" on CI missions, in a uniform devoid of any insignia that might indicate name, rank or even branch of service. Most of the people he met, including American officers, assumed he worked for the CIA, calling him only "Mr. Dave." It was a common misconception that invariably worked in his favor.

"Maybe if we find Saddam's fortune, we can split it," DeLuca said in jest.

"I would spit on Saddam's money," Adnan said.

"So would I," DeLuca said. "Then I'd wipe it off and spend it."

He checked his weapon again. On his very first raid, DeLuca had compulsively double-checked his automatic to make sure he'd chambered a round, imagining Fedeyeen gunmen with RPGs popping up from behind the stone walls and palm trees like the bad guys in the Desert Storm video games his son played during his sullen teenager period. He was slightly more used to it now.

"Hey Joan-Claude," he radioed to VanDamm, using his nickname for her. "Ask Kalil there how much farther." Kalil was a Kurd, younger than Adnan by ten years and smaller, thin and wiry where Adnan was more solidly built. Kalil was from Sulaymaniyah, on the Iranian border, and a bit of an entrepreneur who'd worked for his uncles smuggling cigarettes and alcohol into Iran as a teenager, leading pack trains through the Zagros mountains, but he'd come south after Operation Iraqi Freedom made it safe for him to do so, looking for opportunities. Kalil supposedly knew the area and had been to Ad-Dujayl before. DeLuca looked ahead, where Mack ("Miss Colleen") and his translator Sgt. Linda VanDamm rode in the lead Humvee.

"You should have thought of that before we left," she radioed back. "I'll ask him." She'd served in Frankfurt at the same time DeLuca had, though he hadn't known her there. She was in many ways a seasoned professional; yet she hadn't brushed up on her Arabic since graduating from the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. She was married with three kids and should have been home making sandwiches, not pounding down a dirt road between Iraq and a hard place, DeLuca thought.

"He's not sure," she finally said.

"He's not sure how much farther it is?"

"That's what he just said," she replied.

"Ausgezeichnett," DeLuca said. "Sagt wir sind nicht verloren."

"Wir sind nicht verloren," VanDamm radioed back, matching his pidgeon German. "Nür ein bischen upgefucked. Look at it this way - we don't know where we are, but at least we're making good time."

It was too hot to laugh, nearly 115 degrees in the shade, with a wet-ball of 96 on a 1-100 scale, according to the weather station set up opposite the circle of tents they called home. Everybody had to carry extra water if the wet-ball was above 85. One of the MPs, an undersized kid with a bad complexion, had already taken a bag of glucose just to get himself started. DeLuca had worked as a cop in Yuma, Arizona after getting out of the service the first time, and thought he knew heat. He didn't. He was dark enough that he didn't sunburn easily, but Colleen, with her fair Scotch-Irish complexion, had to slather on sun block four or five times a day, which made her smell surfer-girlish and reminded DeLuca of all the hotties he'd lusted for as a kid at Jones beach during summer breaks. The flak vest DeLuca wore only made it worse, adding another 15-20 degrees.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve and opened the velcro strips on the front of his vest to let the marginally cooler air blow across his drenched DCU blouse. It was standard operating procedure to keep your flak jacket closed on missions, but nobody did. It was also SOP that everybody was supposed to wear their seat belts, but nobody did that either, the common wisdom being that if your vehicle were to come under attack, the faster you could get out of it, the better.

They turned off the main highway and vectored south on a dirt road that paralleled an irrigation canal that drained the Tigris. DeLuca studied his map, trying to figure out where they were. He was tempted to use the sat' phone to call his son at IMINT and ask him where they were. Lieutenant Scott DeLuca led a team monitoring imagery collected by one of the many surveillance satellites the defense department had quietly placed in orbit above the Middle East after the first Gulf War, and could give DeLuca a precise fix if he wanted one, but DeLuca didn't want to abuse the privilege.

"You look a bit like Tony Orlando," DeLuca told Adnan. "Anybody ever tell you that? You remember Tony Orlando and Dawn? Tie a yellow ribbon. No? You ever been to Branson, Missouri?"

"No," Adnan said, shaking his head apologetically.

"You'd love Branson," DeLuca said. He'd taken a vacation there with his wife and hated every minute of it, a fake smile plastered to his face the entire time. "Tony Orlando has his own theater there. People would treat you like a big shot, but you'd have to wear a tuxedo."

They’d dressed Adnan, for his own protection, in an American uniform complete with a camouflaged Kevlar helmet and full battle-rattle and American sunglasses, cheap Ray-Ban knock offs. DeLuca felt sorry for him, considering what he’d been through. He couldn’t imagine losing your wife and child. Adnan had been brought along today because he’d spied for the Iraqi Intelligence Service or “Mukhaberat” back when he’d been a member of the Republican Guard, reporting on any officers showing any disloyalty to the regime. Today they were looking for a man named Omar Hadid, a high-ranking Ba’ath Party member and former Mukhaberat official. Hadid was also a Sheik, the tribal leader in Ad-Dujayl and the grandson of the great sheik Husseini Hadid. DeLuca did not want Omar as much as he wanted the information he could provide. DeLuca’s team’s mission, for the month since he’d left Kuwait, had been to dismantle what remained of the Mukhaberat — find them (or anybody else on the army’s black list he happened to come across), arrest them and start them on their way to Al Guraib or Gitmo as captured enemy combatants or, if appropriate, offer them leniency in return for more useful information. He’d popped 41 former “black list” members so far, including eight faces from the fifty-five on the famous “Deck of Cards.” In the opinion of CENTCOM, putting away the Mukhaberat leadership was as crucial to rebuilding Iraq as finding Saddam had been, because of the reputation the agency had earned during Saddam’s rule. The head of the Mukhaberat, Izzat Mohammed Al-Tariq, had been killed in the opening days of the war, his compound near the center of Baghdad reduced to a sunken pile of rubble when a half-dozen JDAMS and cruise missiles slammed into it. “The Butcher of Kuwait” was responsible for half the bodies that were still being found in the mass graves surrounding Baghdad. He’d given the order to gas the Kurds during the Anfal campaign in 1988 that killed over 100,000 people when Saddam wanted revenge against the Kurds who’d sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Al-Tariq had personally ordered the torture of thousands of individuals, particularly during and after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, such that the government of Kuwait had put a bounty on his head, one 365th of Kuwait’s gross national product, or about $30,000,000, to the man who assassinated him. His preferred method of torture, according to reports, was to disembowel his victims in front of their families. Another story, unconfirmed, said Al-Tariq had kept thousands of his victim’s body parts preserved in formaldehyde jars in a private collection, and that he’d often gotten his victims to reveal what they knew simply by walking them through it. Some of the things Al-Tariq had done were said to have sickened Saddam himself — he was the psychopath Saddam kept on a chain to intimidate the other madmen under his command. Adnan had been one of Al-Tariq’s bodyguards, but only for a month.

Even with Al-Tariq gone, DeLuca’s mission remained important because the Mukhaberat had been the only agency Saddam had trusted to hide his “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” The men who’d worked for Al-Tariq would know where Saddam’s WMD—if he had any—had gone.

DeLuca was taking a drink from a bottle of water, “From the Cool Springs of Saudi Arabia,” the label said.

Suddenly the convoy stopped.

After a few seconds, he got on his radio.

This was no place for something to be wrong.

“What’s up, Mack?” he asked. “Why are we stopped?”

“We’re here, I think,” Mack said. He heard VanDamm’s Arabic in the background.

“What do you mean, ‘we’re here?’ We’re where?”

“That’s the house,” Mack radioed back. “Right in front of us.”

It took him a split second to realize what had happened. Standard procedure was to stop well away from a target to study the “falcon view” first, a composite photograph of the latest satellite imagery, enlarged so that each squad leader had a picture. The next step was to reconnoiter from at least half a kilometer away with binoculars, then form a 360 degree cordon with an armored vehicle on each side, and then move in. What you didn’t want to do, if you could help it, was drive right up to a house full of trouble in broad daylight and stop. There’d evidently been a communication failure.

“Out of the vehicles, everybody!” he commanded.

He pushed Adnan out the door and bailed out his own side, scrambling twenty yards to the wall surrounding the compound. He looked back towards the vehicles. Nobody was moving.

“Get the fuck out and take cover!” he shouted again. “Now!”

Mack and VanDamm exited the lead vehicle, dragging Kalil with them. Mack was quick and light on her feet. VanDamm wasn’t. The MPs were slow to react, their progress hastened when somebody on the top floor of the house suddenly opened fire on them from a window with what appeared to be a Kalishnikov.

As he ducked, DeLuca heard a burst of shots ring out and felt pieces of splintered wall rain down on him.

The SAW gunner on the second Humvee swung his M-60 around and opened up on the house, shattering brick and mortar, sending up a shower of stucco and ceramic roof tiles, soon joined by the gunner on the third vehicle, both men firing so rapidly that there was not the staccato stutter familiarly associated with WWII era machine guns, just a steady horrific roar, until DeLuca could see daylight coming through a hole in the top right corner of the building where the gunman had been.

DeLuca took the opportunity to run to where the MP Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge (NCOIC) had taken cover, a first sergeant named Carter.

“Sergeant Carter — who’s got the back of the house?” DeLuca asked.

“No one,” Carter said, as if the idea of surrounding a house you were trying to capture was something that hadn’t occurred to him.

“Where are the Bradley’s?” DeLuca asked.

Again, the MP didn’t know. DeLuca turned and saw them, holding position a quarter klick up the road.

Somebody had to do something.

“As of now, I’m in charge of this mission,” DeLuca said. “Do you understand?”

Carter nodded.

He pointed to Mack and to VanDamm, used two fingers to point to his own eyes, then pointed to the Hummers, finally gesturing with his Beretta to tell them they were to stay with the vehicles. “Keep our friends with you,” he added into his team radio, one of six walkie-talkies he’d purchased out of pocket at Radio Shack at $150 a pair before leaving Massachusetts, knowing how the army tended to under-equip the National Guard.

VanDamm held up her walkie-talkie to indicate it wasn’t working, which made no sense since he’d put fresh batteries in before leaving Balad. He scrambled over to where they were crouched with the two informants. The SAW gunner opened up on the house again as he ran, though no further shots came from the residence.

“I’m sorry,” VanDamm shouted when DeLuca reached her. She looked terrified on this, her first mission away from post, but she was holding it together. “It got turned off somehow. It’s working now.” Mack looked frightened but was trying hard not to show it, her dark eyes darting behind her goggles as she bit her lip, her nostrils flared. “Do you need me inside?” Linda VanDamm asked.

“I’ll take Ciccarelli,” DeLuca said, referring to the young Specialist fresh out of DLI who they’d picked up for the trip. “I need you and Mack to stay here and make sure our boys don’t get scratched up.” Adnan did not seem frightened Perhaps he truly was prepared to die. DeLuca turned to Kalil. “You’re sure this is the house? One hundred percent positive?”

“Yes,” Kalil said.

“Well that’s a fucking relief,” DeLuca muttered under his breath. The SAW gun opened up again. DeLuca stayed down, taking the opportunity to scramble back to the MPs, where he shouted above the roar.

“Sergeant Carter —pick five people to secure the rear of the compound, and put three on each side. On the wall. Pick two more per and tell them to secure the vehicles. My girls are going to be staying with them — I don’t want to see a hair on their heads out of place when I get back. I want the SAWs manned and cordon the house. If they had RPGs, they would have used them by now.” He pointed to the armored personnel carriers. “Bradleys, one behind the house and one on each side. That’s one, two, and three,” he pointed. “Do it now! Tell the rest of your MPs to come with me.”

He scrambled to the front gate, where he was met by Specialist Ciccarelli, his translator, and the remaining MPs. Ciccarelli looked like a younger version of himself. A few of the MPs were so baby-faced they could have been carded on a Ferris wheel. Nearly all of them were either Army Reserve or National Guard, most of them with families and all of them probably wondering what the hell they were doing in Iraq while all the regular army military policemen were back home writing traffic tickets at stateside army bases.

The weapons fire from the house seemed to have stopped. DeLuca’s intuition told him it was a single shooter and not an organized defense.

“I want you and you at the front window, you on the right and you on the left,” he said. “Everybody else goes in with me. Spread out. On my signal. Who’s the kicker?”

A Latino MP the size of an NFL lineman with the name Arroyo on his breast raised his hand. At 5’10” and 185 pounds, DeLuca was not his own first choice for the job, though he’d done it before. Ordinarily he used Dan, a 6’4” 230 lb. and a karate instructor from San Francisco.

“Where’d you learn?” DeLuca asked the MP.

“LAPD academy, sir.”

“Okay. You’re on the door. I’m first in. Carter, you’re high, I’m low. On the window, stun then cover. Go!”

The MPs spread out down the compound wall, about six feet high with smaller gates at the corners, the wall the same cocoa brown stucco as the house, topped by ceramic tiles. DeLuca tossed his canteen across the front gate to make sure it didn’t draw fire. He backed up a few feet and gave the signal, holding three fingers high, checking to make sure all eyes were on him. He surveyed the building one more time, held up two fingers, then one, and then he pointed towards the house.

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