The Whisperers

It was Sunday evening, and the sun was going down, when they rolled out. They all had good food in their bellies, because the best food was always served on Sundays, but they’d skipped the coffee. There was enough adrenaline coursing before a raid. He remembered the sound his boots made on the dust, the grains of sand compacting beneath the sole, the solidity of the ground and the power of his legs, and then the hollow echo from the floor of the Stryker as he stepped to his seat. Such a simple act, the placing of one foot before the other. Gone now. All gone.

The warehouse was in Al-Adhamiya, the old quarter of Baghdad, a Su

They advanced the last one hundred feet on foot. There were two entrances to the warehouse, which looked more modern than the buildings that surrounded it and was entirely dark inside: one door to the south, at the rear, and the other on the western wall. There were two small windows at ground level, protected by bars, and so thick with dust and grime that it was impossible to see through the glass. The doors were reinforced steel, but they blew the locks with C4 and came in hard and fast. Through the NODs, he saw figures moving, weapons being raised, and even as he fired he thought: something about this is not right. How can we have taken them by surprise? If a fly lands in Al-Adhamiya, someone runs to tell a spider.

One down. Two. He heard a cry of ‘Get some!’ to his left, a voice that he both recognized and did not recognize, a voice transformed by the fury and confusion of combat. A television blared, its screen almost blindingly bright through the goggles, and then the screen exploded and went dark. He heard Tobias shouting ‘Cease fire!’ and it was over. Over almost as soon as it had begun.

They searched the building, and found no other haji. Three were dead, and one was dying. Tobias stood over him while the perimeter was secured, and he thought that he heard words exchanged between them. The squad flipped their goggles as flashlights bounced around the walls, revealing crates and cardboard boxes and odd shapes wrapped in linen. The dying haji’s pupils were dilated, and he was smiling and singing softly to himself.

‘He’s high,’ said Tobias. ‘Artane, probably.’

Artane was an antipsychotic used to treat Parkinson’s disease, but was popular with the younger insurgents. In Baghdad, it was part of the pharmacopia available at places like the Babb al-Sharq, the Eastern Gate. It left the user with a feeling of euphoria and a sense of invulnerability. The haji’s voice rose in prayer, and then there was a single shot as Tobias finished him off. There would be no policing of the dead tonight, no bagging of the bodies to be dropped off at the nearest police station. They would stay where they had fallen.

The dead haji all wore black headbands, the mark of shaheed, of martyrs. He mentioned it to Tobias, but Tobias did not appear interested.

‘So what?’ he said. ‘If they wanted to be martyrs, then they got their wish.’

Tobias didn’t understand. They were waiting for us, he wanted to say, but they barely fought back. If they’d wanted to, they could have taken us in the street, where we were vulnerable, but they didn’t. They let us come to them, and then they let us kill them.

Roddam joined them, speaking on a satellite phone. Minutes later, they heard rumbles and saw lights, and a Buffalo armored vehicle appeared outside. Lord knew how they’d managed to get it down those streets, but somehow they had. It was closely followed by a single Humvee. He didn’t recognize the four men who drove the vehicles. Later, he would learn that they were National Guardsmen, two from Calais, the other two from somewhere in the ass end of the County. More Mainers, more men who owed Tobias a favor. Three never made it home. The fourth was still trying to make his new arms work.

They rolled two pneumatic lifters out of the Buffalo, and started moving the heavier crates out of the warehouse. Tobias formed four of the squad into a line, and they piled the smaller items in the Hummer, and the larger ones into the Buffalo. It took four hours. In all that time, nobody approached the warehouse, and they were allowed to depart Al-Adhamiya unhindered. Along the way, they picked up two teams of snipers. It wasn’t unusual: that was how the system worked. Snipers – Delta, Blackwater, Rangers, SEALS, Marines – would be attached to an infantry unit on a cordon-and-search mission. When the unit left, the snipers would stay and go to ground. Later, a unit would return and pick up the snipers. In this case, he knew that the snipers’ mission had been arranged by Roddam, and only to provide cover for the raid on the warehouse, because their squad had dropped off both teams earlier in the week.

There should have been gunfire, he whispered to himself. They should have been challenged. It made no sense. None of it made any sense.

But it didn’t have to, because they were rich.

Even now, the scale of what Roddam managed to pull off astonished him, but then Roddam was smart: he knew how to exploit the chaos of war, and Iraq was chaos squared. What mattered was what was being brought into the country, not what was being shipped out: half of what they had seized at the warehouse was flown to Canada, sometimes via the US, in otherwise empty planes returning to stock up on more overpriced equipment for the war effort. Larger items were shipped through Jordan, and onward by sea. Where necessary, bribes were paid, but not in the US or Canada. Even without Roddam’s CIA contacts to smooth the way, Iraq was a gold-mine for contractors. Equipment was needed yesterday, at any price, and nobody wanted to be accused of interfering with the war effort by quibbling over paperwork.

Over the months that followed, they all began to drift home, some more intact then others. They handed over their weapons, filled out their medical questio

Or words to that effect.

Then Kuwait, then Frankfurt, passing over Bangor, Maine, on their way to McCord AFB, then back to Bangor again, and home.

All except him, because by then his legs were ruined. He took a different route: a Black Hawk medevac to the CASH in the Green Zone, where he was stabilized before transfer to the trauma center at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Frankfurt, where they performed the amputations. Landstuhl to Ramstein, Ramstein to Andrews AFB on a C-141 Starlifter, men stacked like kindling in the center of the plane, like captives on a slave ship, six inches separating each man from the man above him, the smell of blood and urine sickening, even through the fog of medication, the noise of the aircraft deafening despite the earplugs. Andrews to Walter Reed. The hell of occupational therapy; the attempts to fit prostheses, ultimately abandoned because of the pain they caused him, and he’d had enough of pain.

Then the return to Maine, and the arguments with Tobias. He’d be looked after, Tobias told him; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut. But he wasn’t concerned solely about himself. There had been an agreement: the money would be used to help their brothers- and sisters-in-arms, the ones who were injured, the ones who had lost so much. Tobias said that had changed. He wasn’t going to police the consciences of others. They could give what they wanted. They all could. It was complicated. They had to be careful. Jandreau didn’t understand.