Hunt the Viper Page 6

  “Yeah.…But he’s tough. He’ll be okay.”

  “Whatever’s on your mind, it’s best to talk about it.”

  He didn’t know that much about Rip’s background, except that the twenty-eight-year-old had been raised on a farm. Rip worked hard and had a ready smile and a certain innocence and decency about him. A tattoo of an eagle holding a flag with the slogan “Freedom Is Not Free” peeked from under the rolled-up sleeve on his left arm.

  “Nice tat,” Crocker muttered.

  The young man looked up. “Don’t worry about me, boss.…”

  “You did good today, Rip.”

  “Yeah.…”

  Crocker recognized the confusion in Rip’s eyes. He’d been there many times himself. Questioning whether what he did made a difference. Doubting if he had the mental stamina to continue. Wondering if mankind was cursed by some internal devil that compelled it toward self-destruction.

  “You see the gratitude on the faces of those people back there?”

  “Yeah.…” Rip responded, shaking his head slowly. “I almost lost it…today. I kept thinking about what those animals were gonna do to us when they captured us. I said to myself…before I let that happen I’m gonna take…my own…life.”

  “We all have those thoughts, Rip.”

  “You, too?”

  “Yup.”

  Rip clasped his hands in front of his chest and nodded as he stared at a small crater on the opposite side of the street and the twisted remains of a bicycle.

  “And…I keep thinking about what’s going to happen to these people. I mean, they’re celebrating now. But what happens the next time ISIS comes and we’re not here?”

  “We gotta take it one challenge, one mission at a time. Can’t solve everything in one day.”

  “Embrace the suck, and move forward, right?”

  “Something like that.” Crocker understood that the psychological scars of warfare were the hardest to overcome.

  The call to Isha evening prayers ended with, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, la ilaha illa Allah.” Allah is great, Allah is great, there is no divinity but Allah. It signaled a time for all Muslims to remember God’s presence, guidance, mercy, and forgiveness.

  Sheikh al-Sufi remained on his knees on the carpeted floor of Al-Firdous Mosque, his forehead resting on his hands, feeling anger course through his body, and blood pound in his temples.

  Despite what the Isha prayer said, he could never forgive the infidels who invaded his country, put him in prison, and killed his two sons. The best he could do was to accept his fate as presaged in the words of Allah. “Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful to you. But it is possible that you dislike a thing that is good for you, and love something that is bad for you. But Allah knows, and you do not.”

  Al-Sufi and the mosque’s ancient spiritual leader, Imam Abu Anau Zabas, had argued over the nature of forgiveness many times. The thin, white-bearded imam often quoted a specific passage in the Quran: “Show forgiveness, enjoin what is good, and turn away from the ignorant.”

  Without a doubt, the imam was a good and deeply spiritual man. Al-Sufi could feel the spirit of God in the old man’s presence. But to his mind Imam Zabas didn’t heed the distinctions made in the holy book between the treatment of believers and infidels.

  His journey to the hatred he felt toward them began on a hot day in Tikrit twenty-eight years ago, when his policeman father accompanied him to the town hall to sign papers granting him permission to join the Iraqi Army.

  He served proudly in the Medina Division of the Republican Guard—a Praetorian force handpicked by Saddam Hussein to provide security for his regime. Though not an ardent supporter of Marshal Hussein, he reluctantly accepted his Baathist Arab nationalist secular ideology. What it achieved was a relative peace between Sunni and Shiite Muslims—the latter group making up three-quarters of the Iraqi population.

  That religious peace was shattered in March 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. They did this, they told the world, because the Iraqi leader possessed a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

  When this turned out to be untrue, they told the world that they had deposed Saddam Hussein to free the Iraqi people. The real truth was that they killed them by the hundreds of thousands and divided them, pitting Shiite against Sunni.

  Allah said of infidels: “Slay them wherever you catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter.”

  At the beginning of the occupation, al-Sufi, like many Iraqis, remained hopeful that the Americans would take what they wanted—namely petroleum—and leave Iraq alone. In April 2003, as Major Abu Samir al-Sufi, he joined a delegation of Iraq’s Republican Guard officers that met with U.S. CIA and military in Baghdad. The CIA official they spoke to was an open-minded Lebanese American; the U.S. general happened to be Mexican American.

  Major al-Sufi explained to these Americans that he and other members of the Medina Division of the Republican Guard were professional soldiers and loyal Iraqis, who hadn’t been paid in months. In return for a portion of their back pay, they were willing to help police the country, pick up garbage, or perform any other tasks the Americans wanted. Major al-Sufi and other Iraqi officers told them that they believed many other Republican Guard units would do the same.

  The two American officials seemed to welcome their proposal. But when these men tried to get approval from their superiors in Washington, the proposal was rejected. Instead the U.S. ordered all Republican Guard units to turn over their weapons and disband. They also outlawed the Sunni Baathist party, which had ruled Iraq for decades.

  They did this on the advice of Shiites allied with Iran, and without understanding the consequences—which included the empowerment of Shiite militias that began attacking Sunni neighborhoods and mosques.

  In return for meeting with Americans and dealing with the infidels in a straightforward manner, Major al-Sufi was thrown in a U.S. detention center located outside of Baghdad. He spent four years there studying the Quran, praying, reading, and meeting with jailed Sunni officers like Colonel Haji Bakr, Lt. Colonel Abu Ayan al-Iraqi, and others. It was during his stay in Camp Bucca that the idea of creating an Islamic state to extend through the Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria was born.

  Kneeling in prayer, he recited verse 33:35 of the Quran:

  For the men who acquiesce to the will of God, and the women who acquiesce,

  the men who believe and the women who believe,

  the men who are devout and the women who are devout,

  the men who are truthful and the women who are truthful,

  the men who are constant and the women who are constant,

  the men who are humble and the women who are humble,

  the men who give charity and the women who give charity,

  the men who fast and the women who fast,

  the men who are chaste and the women who are chaste,

  and the men and women who remember God day and night,

  God has arranged forgiveness for them, and a magnificent reward.

  Chapter Seven

  I attribute my success to this—I never gave or took any excuse.

  —Florence Nightingale

  No way Crocker could sleep. Not after a day like that. With his HK416 slung across his shoulder and SIG Sauer P226 pistol tucked into the waistband of his desert camo pants, he crossed the town square, turned right, and stopped when he found the blue cross beside the doorway that led to the basement hospital. A portion of the top story of the building had been sheared off, something he hadn’t noticed before. He wondered if the damage was recent and the facility had moved.

  That’s when a familiar-looking man wearing a light-blue medical gown emerged smoking a cigarette.

  “The hospital’s still open?” Crocker asked.

  “Yes,” the man with the bushy black hair answered, placing his cigarette between his teeth and offeri
ng his hand. “Dr. Housani. We met before.…”

  “Yeah. I remember.…”

  “Terrible day…” The doctor looked at the damaged buildings and sighed. He had heavy bags under his eyes. “I was raised Muslim, and I don’t know how real Muslims can justify something like this. The Quran I know talks about love, forgiveness, and peace.”

  “Maybe the guys who attacked us didn’t read that part,” Crocker said, as the moon shone in his eyes. “I came to see a friend of mine…named Dilshad. You know if he’s here?”

  “No, but…come look for yourself,” Dr. Housani gestured, dropping the cigarette to the ground and crushing it out with the heel of one of his dirty white shoes. Crocker noticed that the toe of one of them was spattered with blood.

  As they ducked inside, an explosion detonated several blocks away, sending a shiver up Crocker’s spine and causing him and Housani to kneel in the doorway and take cover.

  Expecting another rocket attack, Crocker retrieved the radio from his back pocket and said, “Davis, that sounded like it was coming from your direction. What’s going on?”

  “UXO, we believe,” Davis responded. Unexploded ordnance. “CT’s checking on it now.”

  Crocker turned to the doctor. “Could be a grenade, mortar, or rocket round that landed earlier and didn’t go off.”

  Housani nodded. “Come.…” He led him down dark stairs, to a corridor and through double doors. The large room they entered reeked of alcohol and iodine and was crowded with beds and mattresses—some of the patients on them slept, others moaned and called for nurses. Crocker counted three exhausted-looking attendants, one man and two women, scurrying about.

  “Doctors?” Crocker asked.

  “Only one and a half. Me, an obstetrician, and an epidemiologist from France. You a doctor?”

  “Medic. Corpsman, we call ’em in the Navy.”

  “Then…welcome.”

  The basement room, lit as it was by bare overhead bulbs, reminded him of a scene from a painting or a movie. Picasso’s Guernica, sort of, but in murky shades of brown and gray interrupted by slashes of white and red. A short, dark-haired nurse hurried over and spoke urgently into Housani’s ear.

  He turned to Crocker. “Some people were wounded from the recent explosion.…They’re arriving now. When did your friend get here?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “If he’s still here, you’ll find him in this room.”

  “Thanks.”

  Crocker squeezed past hampers stuffed with bloody towels and bandages, and mothers and fathers sleeping beside the beds of children with missing limbs. He scolded himself for not coming earlier and bringing his medical bag.

  To his right, he saw a man with a dark mustache lying on the floor with a dirty towel over one of his legs. He didn’t moan or complain, but his teeth were clenched tight and he appeared to be in tremendous pain.

  Unable to locate a nurse, Crocker knelt beside the man, and lifted the towel. The wound consisted of a two-inch avulsion, or tearing away of the skin and tissue above the knee. Bleeding had stopped, but the tear hadn’t been cleaned properly and the skin around it had started to darken, which wasn’t good.

  “I’ll clean this up,” Crocker whispered to the man, before getting to his feet and searching for medical supplies. He needed pain medication, disinfectant, gauze, dressings, sutures, bandages. He also needed to wash his hands.

  On a metal cart, he found nitrile medical gloves and an empty box of cotton gauze. An arched passageway clogged with stretchers stood two beds away. A woman in a dark-green hospital tunic and jeans leaned over one of them. On it lay a boy whose face looked ashen and drawn. A piece of dirty canvas covered his body. His breathing appeared weak and shallow.

  The nurse said something to Crocker in what sounded like Farsi spoken with a foreign accent.

  “I don’t understand,” he responded.

  She turned to him, and the space between them seemed to stand still for a moment. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties and was probably European—light-brown hair, almond-shaped dark eyes, long, full lips, freckles across her nose.

  “You’re American?” she asked in a French accent.

  “I’m part of a military team. There’s a man on the floor back there with a leg that needs to be attended to.”

  “It is an emergency?”

  “Not yet, but will be.”

  “Help me with this first.” She had a smooth, confident voice and manner. “Grab the other end. I need to get him into that room.”

  She looked too refined to be in a grisly place like this. Crocker was about to ask which room, when he saw the open door behind her.

  “You’re the epidemiologist?” he asked. “Have you taken his pulse?”

  “Yes, and no. Not yet.”

  “The patient appears to be in the latter phases of traumatic shock.”

  She was thin, but strong. They maneuvered the stretcher inside and set it on a long wooden table that looked like it had come from a dining room. The room was maybe ten by eight with a simple globe-type fixture overhead that didn’t give off sufficient light.

  “We’re gonna need a task light of some sort,” said Crocker.

  She shook her head, as if to say, That’s impossible.

  “We must be very careful,” she said, pointing to the canvas tarp that covered the boy’s body.

  Together they lifted it by the ends and set it along the wall.

  He watched her eyes as she looked down at the boy. They seemed to darken and grow still. Crocker had seen worse injuries on the battlefield. The fact that the victim was young added to the horror of seeing his stomach ripped open and his lower organs exposed.

  “I’m not a surgeon,” the woman whispered.

  “I can do this,” Crocker whispered back.

  He didn’t have time to explain that he wasn’t a doctor or a surgeon, but had been trained in combat medicine, and had sewn up wounds and delivered obstructed babies in conditions inferior to this.

  The radio he’d stuffed into his waistband beeped.

  “Deadwood, it’s Romeo. We had a single UXO. No follow-up attack.”

  “Good,” he grunted back, his eyes never leaving the Frenchwoman.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the clinic. I’ll call you back.”

  He glanced back at the boy and wondered how all the red organs and purple-tinged intestines would fit back into his stomach. Then assured himself they would.

  The woman waited. He said, “I’m gonna need sutures, disinfectant, antibiotics, anesthetic, clean towels.”

  “We ran out of general anesthetics an hour ago,” she answered.

  “Bring me what you have. I’ll watch the boy and check his vitals.”

  “Bien.”

  Soon as she turned to leave, the radio beeped again.

  “Deadwood, Romeo.…”

  “Romeo, what’s up?”

  “Davis just reported people moving near the north perimeter.”

  “What kind of people?” Crocker asked.

  “Militants…he thinks. With at least one truck.”

  “He sure it’s not Rastan’s men arriving?”

  “We called Rastan. His men won’t be here for another hour or so.”

  “Fuck.”

  This isn’t where he wanted to be—in a drainage ditch 500 meters north of the town’s perimeter, locating the gunner of the Russian-made 9P135 launch tripod through his ground-panoramic NVG-18s. Crocker’s mind remained on the boy with his guts spilled out in the makeshift hospital and the attractive woman from Doctors Without Borders whose name he didn’t know yet.

  He had to force himself to focus on the situation in front of him, and move quickly through the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). It was imperative. Because he could see standing behind the gunner the silhouettes of two more insurgents carrying 1.7kg high-explosive 9M111 missiles, capable of striking targets up to two thousand meters away. The 9M111 was an antitank
weapon, but capable of inflicting massive damage on a hard target with more than three times the explosive power of RPG-fired rockets.

  The effect of even a handful of them on the concrete walls and tile roofs of Qabusiye could be devastating—a final punch in the gut from Daesh; a warning not to resist next time, or welcome members of the Coalition.

  Resistance in other towns in Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria had resulted in beheadings, rapes, and mass executions. As a Coalition soldier, sometimes by defending a town, you put it in jeopardy. He didn’t want to leave Qabusiye that way, and hoped that the Peshmerga unit on its way would stay awhile. But that wasn’t under his control, nor was the fate of the rest of western Kurdistan.

  In an eerie shade of light green he saw what looked like a new Toyota Land Cruiser parked behind the three-man team. Where ISIS got its arsenal of military equipment was a subject of controversy. The White House wanted the public to believe that most of it had been seized from the Iraqi Army in cities like Mosul, Ramada, and Tikrit. But a lot of the ISIS equipment Crocker and his men had seen appeared brand new, and was rumored to have been supplied by Sunni supporters on the Arabian peninsula from countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

  It continued to be a clear, beautiful night with a temp in the mid-fifties. He scanned left and right, and didn’t spot other teams—not in the vicinity at least. Akil and Davis, who were patrolling west and south, hadn’t encountered additional militants, either, or he would have been alerted.

  They appeared to be facing a lone demo team bent on terrorizing an already traumatized town. Rip on his belly to his right. Both of them were armed with MK 11 Mod 0 semiautomatic sniper rifles fitted with Leupold sights and QD suppressors. Crocker held up three fingers and pointed left, indicating that he would take out the gunner.

  Rip nodded. Crocker flipped the NVGs to the top of his helmet, located the gunner in the crosshairs, exhaled, then gently squeezed the trigger. The 7.62mm x 51mm rounds made a muffled spitting sound as they flew out the front of the barrel. A split second later, Rip fired. Six rounds each was all it took to put down the three insurgents.