Cemetery Road Page 18

  I never found out.

  As I lay there grieving the brief flicker of warmth and light that had been my mortal existence, Paul and an ex-Ranger named Gary Inman hurled two flash-bang grenades into the room, blinding and deafening everyone in it. Five seconds later, every man but me had been shot through the head.

  “CANYOUWALK?” Paul shouted in my ear.

  “Paul?” I blubbered, tears streaming from my eyes.

  He jerked me to my feet. “Come on, Goose! MOVE!”

  “Where?” I gasped, staggering like a blind drunk.

  “Grab my fucking belt and stay on my ass!”

  I jammed my hand into his pants and hung on like a baby monkey clinging to its mother. The gunshots had triggered pandemonium in the house. No Iraqi was sure who was shooting or why. In the midst of this chaos, the skill set possessed by Paul and his buddy proved to be a force multiplier of astonishing lethality. I saw Paul shoot two men in the face while they tried to figure out who he was and where he’d come from. When another insurgent threw up his hands in defense, Paul shot him through his hands. Barely functioning, I hung on to Paul’s belt as he swept through the house, killing all before him.

  Inman kicked open a door that led into a narrow alley I remembered from our previous life, which seemed a thousand years ago. We darted left first, but a Toyota pickup with a bed-mounted machine gun shrieked to a stop just past the opening. That armed Toyota—known as a “technical”—would back up any second to finish us off.

  Paul veered right and charged down the alley. We’d almost reached the other end when the technical opened up. Heavy-caliber bullets ripped into the masonry wall to my right, and either a bullet or stone shrapnel knocked down Gary Inman.

  “LEAVE HIM!” Paul shouted, after a momentary glance.

  I did.

  The next street was hardly more than an alley itself. Paul started left again (as though he had a specific destination), but the familiar whine of an engine told us the Toyota was coming back to head us off. Paul skidded to a stop, jerked my arm, and led me back the other way.

  Twenty yards up the alley, a Honda Accord had stopped, facing us. It sat idling, headlights off, as if waiting for us to commit to a move. The street was so narrow that we couldn’t slip around the car. I tried to see through the dark windshield. A bearded man sat behind the wheel, and beside him I discerned what looked like a white hijab.

  The squeal of brakes sounded behind us. The Toyota—

  The driver of the Accord screamed, and the hijab beside him flared white. Then their windshield exploded in a hail of bullets. I whirled left. Paul had raised his M4 and was riddling the car. The sight of that windshield shattering into a hail of glass and blood paralyzed me.

  “FOLLOW ME!” he shouted.

  Paul ran right over the hood and roof of the Accord, his boots smashing dents in the holed metal, then dived onto the cobblestones beyond the trunk. I know I followed him, because I looked down through the missing windshield as I climbed over the car. Inside lay a man and woman. The man had jerked the woman into his lap to shield her with his body, but his effort had gone in vain. Both bodies were covered in bright red blood. The man’s head had been smashed wide open by a bullet.

  As I leaped off the trunk, I heard a child crying behind me. I started to turn back, but Paul dragged me to the ground as the technical opened up again. While the machine gun chewed the Honda into scrap metal, we belly-crawled to the end of that alley.

  Waiting in the next street like a golden chariot was the Mamba belonging to Paul’s Alpha team. Beside it a ShieldCorp contractor named Evans stood like a bored chauffeur. “Does this complete your party, sir?” he asked with a grin.

  “We’re it,” Paul said. “Get the fuck out of Dodge. There’s a technical right behind us.”

  “Rangers lead the way, motherfuckers!” yelled Evans, and then he shoved us inside and climbed in after us. Four ShieldCorp contractors carrying MP5 submachine guns grinned back at me.

  I’ll omit the details of our escape from Ramadi. There were more casualties, but lying inside that South African armor, the only thing I wanted to know was where Paul had been during those awful minutes I was a prisoner. As it turned out, while the insurgents overran the house, Paul and Inman had climbed over the edge of the roof and dropped down into a ten-inch gap between the ShieldCorp house and the one next door. Because the walls were so close together, they’d needed no ropes. They simply wedged themselves between the two buildings and slid halfway to the ground. Before long, they picked up what was going on inside the house.

  While in this stone sandwich, Paul sent out an emergency text to the Alpha team, which was parked near one of the roadblocks. Upon hearing that Paul was in imminent danger of being killed, Alpha team used RPGs and their Mamba’s machine gun to smash through the roadblock, then drove to the street Paul had named in a previous text. One thing I didn’t learn until later was that Gary Inman had wanted to run straight for the Mamba. The German engineer was already dead—killed by a random shot during the final charge—so their mission was a failure. But Paul had insisted they go back for me. In fact, another ShieldCorp guy later confided to me that Paul told Inman if he didn’t go back for me, Paul would shoot him and leave his corpse stuck between the buildings.

  As dramatic as all that was, the defining moment occurred later, when I was writing about our experience. I was haunted by those Iraqis in that Accord. Why didn’t Paul just run right over the car without shooting the people inside? I wondered. But of course I knew. They could have been insurgents themselves, and Paul wasn’t going to take any chances. But why not at least fire warning shots, to back the Accord down the alley? That’s what his teams did during convoy escort duty. Again the primal voice in my head answered: If Paul had done that, we’d have been trapped on the wrong side of the Accord when the technical opened fire . . .

  These justifications meant little in the dead of night when sleep escaped me. Because I was so haunted by that Iraqi child’s cry, I wrote two drafts of the chapter about my rescue. One included the Accord, the other didn’t. As the drop-dead date approached during the copyediting phase of my manuscript’s production schedule, I heard that Paul and one of his teams had gotten into some trouble, this time in the Jamhori Quarter of Ramadi, during the Second Battle of Fallujah.

  Paul had a third team operating by then: Sierra Charlie. Apparently, Charlie team—with Paul along—had gotten pinned down during a protective detail, and things got very hot. Paul called in the Little Bird for evac, but the helicopter took so much fire that it had to peel off. Left on its own, the ShieldCorp unit had gone into offensive mode and shot its way out of the neighborhood. It went through some houses to do so—several contiguous structures—and civilians were killed. A fire had broken out as well, which caused more casualties.

  I could see how it happened. If Paul had lost another VIP principal under his protection—and brought out nothing but the man’s passport and wedding ring, as he had with the German engineer—his business would have dried up overnight. But even the military officers assigned to quietly investigate the incident agreed that Paul’s unit had shot people without cause. Two kids were seriously wounded. One lost a leg. Complaints were filed, legal action threatened. The Hague was mentioned. A couple of generals wanted Paul tried as an example to all “cowboy contractors.” But because there had been a long series of kidnappings and executions in the wake of the first Fallujah operation, the Pentagon wasn’t feeling too charitable toward the Iraqis just then. Still, Paul’s unit had made a hell of a mess.

  Given what was at stake for Paul, I decided to omit the Honda Accord from my public retelling of the night of April 8 in Ramadi. I didn’t lie to myself about what I was doing. Without the Accord incident, it was a different story. It wasn’t reality. But it would become history. With that omission, I edited the truth into something like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and I never forgave myself for it. When Hollywood came calling five months later, I declined to option m
y book. That was my self-inflicted punishment, meager as it may seem now. I neither wanted nor deserved that money. That said, I did not turn down the Pulitzer Prize I won for the same book, which covered all my time in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. And I have reaped untold benefits from that Pulitzer. Every time I’m introduced on television, they mention it. In every bio in every pamphlet handed out before I give a speech for $20,000 or $30,000, that Pulitzer leads my list of accomplishments. For years I’ve prayed to win another, to wipe the shadow of false pretense from my life. But while I’ve made the list of finalists twice more, I’ve never again won the award.

  Paul’s outcome was very different. He wasn’t tried or officially punished for any action he took on the day he and his men shot their way out of the Jamhori Quarter. But he was ordered by Joint Task Force command to leave Iraq, and ShieldCorp had all its government contracts canceled. Worse, Paul was personally barred by both the State Department and the Pentagon from returning to either Afghanistan or Iraq. My book made him a hero to a lot of people, but less than a year after he saved my life, Paul watched his business condemned to oblivion. He returned to Bienville, Mississippi, to work for his father, and within three months, he relapsed into heavy drinking.

  Thirteen years later, I would return to Bienville and start sleeping with his wife. It sounds low, I know—perhaps unforgivable to some. But here’s the thing: I loved Jet first. She loved me first. More to the point, I’m not sure Paul ever loved her. He wanted her, sure, but that’s a different thing. I wouldn’t be alive today if Paul had not gone back into that house to save me. And I would probably be dead if he hadn’t shot those people in the Honda Accord. But there’s also this: if I had written the truth about the people in that Accord in my book—while the Pentagon was making up its mind about ShieldCorp’s bloody escape from Jamhori—then Paul might have gone to federal prison for the second incident, and the fame that my book brought him as a fearless warrior would have been forever tainted.

  The way I figured it, we were even.

  Chapter 17

  When I first moved back to Bienville from Washington, I rented an apartment downtown, just a short walk from the Watchman building. I knew I couldn’t live in my parents’ house, and there was nothing to rent in their neighborhood. They’re still in the tract house Adam and I grew up in, a 1950s ranch-style with pleasing touches of midcentury modern, set in a wooded subdivision that was filled with kids when I was growing up but is now inhabited by old people, many widows living alone.

  The downtown apartment worked well until Jet and I started sleeping together. After that, it was too risky. I needed a secluded refuge that could give us real privacy while we worked out what the future was going to look like for us. To that end, I bought an old farmhouse on six isolated acres east of town. The place had sat on the market for two years. Only fifteen minutes from downtown, it’s bounded by woods on all sides, and there’s only one entrance by road.

  It was 2:50 when I reached home after my raid on Buck’s rental house. Jet had set our rendezvous at three, but because she must evade not only her husband but also anyone else she might run into before meeting me, it’s not uncommon for her to be an hour late. As soon as I walked in, I called Nadine Sullivan and told her I would love to attend the party on the roof of the Aurora, if she would still have me. Nadine replied that she was glad to have the company and was looking forward to it. Then I opened a Heineken and walked out to my back patio, which looks onto four acres of woods.

  Lying back on a teak steamer chaise, I checked my email on my iPhone. I felt guilty that I wasn’t rifling through Buck’s files and maps without delay, but given that I hadn’t found any bones at the rental house, I didn’t think the task was urgent. There would be time to go through the stuff after Jet left and before the party. I did watch Denny Allman’s edited drone video, which was a masterpiece featuring superimposed GPS coordinates, and I made a note to pay Denny well for that footage. I wasn’t sure what I could do with it, other than go out to the mill site in the middle of the night and risk being killed to try to unearth evidence that an army of technicians would be unlikely to find. Publishing the video to the Watchman’s website might be an option, but the video on its own proved little. I took another swallow of Heineken and watched the tree line.

  The first sign I usually see is Jet walking out of the shadows beneath those trees, sixty yards away. A few times she has driven her car across the grass and right up to the patio, but leaving her car visible beside my house is too dangerous, even with my security gate. Though only Jet and I know the code required to open the gate, a single electrical glitch could allow a mailman or UPS driver to ride up to the house and recognize Jet’s Volvo. When it comes to risk, we’ve pushed the envelope a few times, but in general we’ve worked hard to eliminate any chance of disaster.

  That’s the only way we’re going to get what we want.

  Most extramarital affairs begin with the understanding that they’re not going anywhere. This pragmatic truth isn’t generally stated, but both parties—even first-timers—usually grasp the unwritten rules of the game. We’re not in this to blow up our families. They may be deluding themselves, of course. One may be acting out of desperation, grabbing for a ripcord to escape a marriage they’ve become convinced is a trap. Another might have fallen truly in love, or at least under the grip of romantic delusion, which becomes the equivalent of a ticking bomb.

  Jet and I are different. We’re not playing a game. We wanted each other long before I moved back to Bienville, and not simply to consummate the desire that had gone unfulfilled for so long. The love that bloomed when we were kids had survived a nearly thirty-year separation during which we were alone together only twice. If I were self-indulgent, I might call us star-crossed lovers, but the truth is much simpler:

  I was stupid.

  The first time I saw Jet alone after I left Bienville for UVA was during her senior year of college. She was finishing a year early at Millsaps, a small liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi, and she’d flown up to Washington to tour Georgetown Law School. Without telling anyone—including me—she made a quick side trip to Charlottesville. We spent the whole day together, and we slept together that night. Only in the morning did she tell me that she’d been seeing Paul on and off since he’d gotten back from Ranger duty in Somalia. This revelation—along with the shaved-to-stubble pubic hair that greeted me when she wriggled out of her pants—told me that much had changed in her life. I felt sure the grooming choice was Paul’s preference, though she denied it.

  I had no right to be angry. When I left Mississippi, I left for good. Except for a few Thanksgivings and Christmases, I hadn’t been home. Paul, on the other hand, had left the army and was working for his father, only forty miles from Millsaps. When I asked Jet what the chances were that she would choose Georgetown, she told me zero—she couldn’t afford it. She’d only come up to see me. She would be entering Ole Miss Law School in the fall.

  After that, she and Paul saw each other in a hit-or-miss fashion, at least for some years. But after Jet got her law degree, she took a job with a firm in New Orleans, and they eventually got back together for real. Eight years after our UVA rendezvous, in 2001, she called me from the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C., where she was attending a National Bar Association conference. I met her in a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel, and this time she was straight with me about why she’d come. She’d been dating Paul exclusively for two years, and she sensed that he was about to propose marriage. Before that happened, she wanted to give me a chance to say anything that I might feel needed to be said.

  This pragmatic offer stunned me. I was in no position to ask her not to marry Paul. I’d taken a leave of absence from the Post to get a master’s in international relations from Georgetown. I was also dating one of my professors, a French economics expert named Chloe Denard. But it was less my relationship with Chloe that kept me from admitting my feelings for Jet than my resentment at how close Jet ha
d gotten to Paul. If she could sleep with Paul for years without calling me, why the hell was she coming to see me only days before he proposed to her?

  I didn’t say that to her, of course. Too many years had passed without me facing hard truths about myself. So I talked around the truth, and she let me. The unspoken fact was that I’d always loved her, and I’d let the gulf between my father and me keep me a thousand miles away from her for eleven years. Jet understood that, I think. But she left it unspoken, too. We drank a lot of wine, and we slept together for the second time in a decade. That one night was better than all the nights I had slept with Chloe Denard, or any other woman.

  I didn’t tell Jet that, either.

  She married Paul six months later, shortly before 9/11. I was invited to the wedding, but I didn’t attend. After I returned from Iraq in 2004, and The Hague was considering charging Paul and his fellow ShieldCorp contractors with war crimes, she and I spoke privately again. Jet was deeply upset, not only because of Paul’s legal jeopardy, but also because she was afraid that he and his men had really murdered civilians. On top of this, Paul had become depressed and was drinking heavily. She feared he might be suicidal. She wanted my best guess as to whether Paul and his men were guilty. She also wanted to know about my experiences with ShieldCorp in Ramadi.

  As I’d done in one draft of the manuscript by that time, I omitted the story of the bullet-riddled Honda from my description of Paul’s rescue. I couldn’t see that any benefit would result from telling her the truth, other than driving her away from her husband. And by then I didn’t see that as a positive. I’d gotten engaged to Molly McGeary two weeks after returning from Ramadi, and we were set to be married three months later. Hearing the strain in Jet’s voice probably weighed heavily in my decision to omit the Accord story from my book. I’ve never told Paul that. Sometimes I wish I had. In any case, he managed to escape prosecution, and their lives moved on.