The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows (10 page)

The stainless-steel robotic gripper latched on tightly to the explosive charge I offered it, our robot driver Mengershausen deftly snatching it via the control station in the Humvee. Each robot was paired with its own flip-open control unit, an LCD television screen, and dashboard of joysticks, dials, toggle switches, and remote-firing systems that allowed a human driver, protected in an armored Humvee, to guide the robot’s movements and see what the robot sees using a variety of cameras. It was a disorienting experience, no depth perception at all and spatial awareness at a premium, unless you practiced regularly and honed your skills. Thus each team had one dedicated robot driver, who thought of little else. Quiet, soft-spoken, watch-cap-clad Mengershausen was this team’s operator.

I waved into the robot’s tall mast camera, indicating he was clear to send the mechanism downrange. The F6A rumbled down the road and over the bridge, searching for our mysterious pile of trash.

Seconds turned into minutes. Minutes piled up. Plenty of trash, but none hiding a bomb. The robot had dug through its eighth pile of innocuous dirt when Castleman started to get frustrated and called Cougar 13 on the radio.

“Where’s the fucking IED?” he politely asked.

“You mean you can’t find it?”

“No, we can’t find it.”

“Well.…” There was a pause on the radio from Cougar 13.

“Maybe it’s closer to the other end of the bridge,” Cougar 13 finally replied.

The bridge over the Khasa was half a mile long. Our robot’s range was much less than that. We couldn’t get to the bomb from where we were. Our security had driven us to the wrong side of the bridge.

The sweltering darkness of the desert night was starting to press in as the sweat dripped down my face, to the end of my nose, and then onto my rifle, hanging down the center of my chest. There was a restlessness to the air, an agitation vibrating through the city. The gunfire was increasing from the other side of the wadi. The honking of horns in the traffic backup created by our security blockade was increasingly agitated. Shouts and gunshots would occasionally startle from behind, or to the side, and then stop suddenly. A crowd had begun to form at the edge of the security cordon, onlookers that talked on cell phones, yelled after their children, barely flinching at the sound of the gunfire. At times, Kirkuk can be a peaceful town, high and dry in the north Iraqi uplands. But at night, the city sometimes transformed, turned, became a thing alive. The tension in the air was rising, a tingle on the scalp. You could feel it grow angry, violent, uncontrolled, edging to a riot. It’s exhilarating and terrifying to be the focus of a city’s tentacled hate. This whole town was about to go bat-shit crazy, and we were on the wrong side of the bridge.

“What do you want to do now?” I asked Castleman.

“We need to get on the other side of the bridge, and it’ll take too long to drive around,” he responded.

He was right—the detour to the other side of the river was several miles, and almost an hour’s drive in nearly unmoving traffic.

“So you want to drive across the bridge?” Was I actually asking this?

“That’s right.”

“Past the IED we can’t find and through the small-arms fire?”

“Got a better idea?” Castleman’s tone was final.

In point of fact, I did not.

Several minutes later we remounted to drive across the bridge, our robot re-stowed and explosives tossed in the back of the Humvee. The rest of the Cougar 13 element was already waiting for us, having spent the last hour holding up traffic on the eastern end of the span. The Colonel, who had been waiting patiently inside the truck with Mengershausen, looked at me and gave an “Are we really driving over that?” look. I nodded. And with a quick extinguishing of our headlights, we plunged into the deep surreal.

We crept forward, the bridge decking rising steadily ahead of us, a slightly lighter gray against the impenetrable night sky. The gunfire on the opposing bank was constant, but no longer directed at us, as we took the long drive alone and unlit. The occasional ricochet pinged off the top of the truck, an annoying buzzing insect just out of reach. Keener looked forward as he drove. Castleman and Mengershausen scanned the front and sides of the road for our suspicious pile of dirt and trash. I stared at the jammer.

All IEDs fall into one of three basic categories: victim-operated, timed, and command. This one probably wasn’t set to go off when someone stepped on it or drove past, or else it would have been tripped when Cougar 13 found it. It also probably wasn’t time initiated, a tactic normally reserved for attacks on large infrastructure. A device this small wasn’t going to bring down the bridge, and how did the bomber know when we’d drive by? That left command, meaning that the bomb was waiting for a signal to detonate. A power dump via a long copper wire. Or a call from a cell phone. Or a code transmitted on a walkie-talkie. Even Iraqi security would have noticed a guy stringing a half mile of lamp cord along the bridge railing, so command wire was probably out. That left radio transmission as the most likely scenario. We had one defense against this threat, and I was monitoring it now.

The green LED display continuously flickered through its cycle as we slowly inched up the bridge, the jammer scanning and monitoring and broadcasting its drowning tone thousands of times a second. The tiny readout, a sick joke by the designing engineers, provided precious little information. Just a string of numbers to be dissected and fretted over.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 2 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

Each number a channel, each channel hit in sequence, each digit a different threat frequency momentarily squashed. The numbers flicked by so quickly I could barely discern them.

7 8 9 10 2 11 12 13 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 7 8 9 10 2 11 12 13

2 14 1 2 3 4 5 2 6 7 8 2 9 10 11 2 12 13 2 14 1 2 3 4 5 2

“I think we’re getting closer,” I called up to Castleman.

6 7 8 9 2 10 11 2 12 13 2 14 1 2 3 4 2 5 6 2 7 8 2 9 2 10

2 11 2 12 2 13 2 14 2 1 2 3 2 4 2 5 2 6 2 7 2 8 2 9 2 10 2

“We’re almost on top of it.”

Two little metal boxes in our truck, two innocuous antennas mounted on the exterior hardened skin, matching wits with someone hidden trying to kill us as we drove. Could he hear our truck? Could he see us? A glint off our reflective headlights providing a lethal clue?

Soon we came upon, and nearly hit, some abandoned cars left in the roadway. When Cougar 13 evacuated the area, not everyone took their ramshackle Vauxhalls with them. Slowly we swerved around these cars and trash, threading a needle of potential car bombs, nearing the top of the span, looking for the bomb that must be close, when our driver stopped short.

“Dude, why are you stopping?” I yelled up to Keener.

“There’s a guy pointing a gun at me!”

“What?!” Castleman and I dismounted into mayhem. A crowd of Iraqi Police were milling about on the top of the bridge, their American partners nowhere to be found. Light blue police uniform shirts untucked, clutching their dirty AK-47s, the IP looked lost and confused. I don’t speak Arabic, and our terp was safely back with the Bayonet 23 security detail at the base of the bridge. Castleman leaned his blond head back into the truck and picked up the radio, screaming and incredulous that an IP patrol would be stranded on the bridge next to an IED and inside of a supposedly sealed cordon. The police had obviously independently discovered the bomb and had been guarding it, waiting for us to respond. Now they were lost in the middle of a firefight with no radio communication, stuck on a bridge between two American security teams that would shoot them if they approached. I would have laughed if I wasn’t stuck on the bridge with them.

I waved at the IP to follow me as I took cover behind an abandoned car, putting the beat-up sedan between me and the threat: an unfound IED to my front and gunfire on the far right bank. Several IP approached hesitantly, more nervous about me than the chance of getting shot out in the open on the top of the bridge.
Insha’Allah
.

“You need to get off the bridge,” I yelled over the drone of our Humvee’s diesel engine.

I received blank stares in return. I tried again with a mixture of sign language and basic English.

“Big Boom!” I said, and pointed further ahead. They started arguing among themselves, pointing at either end of the bridge. This wasn’t working.

I then noticed one policeman, quieter and standing to one side, who looked out of place. A bandanna on his head, and a face a little too clean shaven. A navy blue shirt, too dark. No moustache, and a paler face. Not Arab. Not Kurdish. Turk? American spook?

I went with my gut.

“You need to get these guys off the fucking bridge right now. That way.” I pointed behind me.

“Mista, Mista!” he responded back, shaking his head and putting up his hands in a sign of incomprehension. But the “mista”s didn’t sound right either. I looked at him, and he back. A blink. And then he was off, yelling at the IP to follow, down the bridge behind us. The spook vanished.

“What the fuck was that about?” Keener asked.

“They’re lost.” So are we. “Let’s go.”

Again we remounted, and resumed slowly crawling forward, peering at the fuzzy grays and blacks of the dark roadway, the green flicker of the jammer lighting up the inside of the truck. Castleman was radioing to Cougar 13 on the other side of the bridge, coordinating and clearing our approach, when Keener suddenly veered to the right, off the center stripe of the road where we had been driving, and buried the gas pedal, tearing toward the brightening headlights of the awaiting soldiers. I guess we found it.

I quickly looked out my window and down. There it was. A pile of garbage just a little different than every other pile of garbage. A wire looped out of the trash. A rounded metal curve in the otherwise random jumble. A pile of refuse like all the others on every street in this city … except this one contained enough explosives to kill me where I sat. Inches from my door, from my feet and legs and heart. The other piles of trash in this city could contain an IED. This one actually did. The sure proximity was unnerving no matter how many times I endured it. The bomb lay right
there
, next to me, out my window, waiting.

Keener flipped a U-turn at the end of the bridge and buried us amid the welcoming blanket of the far-side security. I redeployed the robot, grabbed another explosive water bottle, and soon it was working its way toward the pile of trash we had spotted. This side of the bridge was freer of small-arms fire but just as rowdy, a crowd of honking horns and headlights and empty bombed-out apartments looming over us. A dark single-family home with an open mouth lay to our right. I peered into the open door, saw movement, blinked my eyes and shook my head, and it was gone. We needed to clear this IED and be done.

Castleman called out that the robot camera had found our prize. I turned back to the Humvee, and watched through the controller screen as the robotic claw closed on a small two-way radio and started to pull. Motorola 5320? 8530? I’d have to check later, when we wrote the report. Normal setup for the radio bomber who worked in this area was a crude mechanical timer as a safety backup, a nine-volt battery, and a single electric blasting cap. The robot arm lifted and extended, revealing just that: radio connected to battery connected to cap connected to a heavy gray 120-millimeter mortar shell. The Colonel was leaning forward, transfixed, staring at the flat screen, its eerie light iridescent in the deep night. Now to place our explosives, blow everything apart, and get out of here. None too soon.

I went to the back of the truck to prepare our charge for detonation, and instead saw our security trucks, which had been blocking traffic, starting to line up in a convoy formation. To leave. They can’t leave—we’re not done yet.

“Why is our security leaving?” I called to the front of the truck, yelling to make myself heard over the constant diesel din.

Castleman grabbed the radio and had too short of a conversation.

“Cougar 13 says they’ve been fragged to investigate a car bombing in the Kurdish market on the north end of the city,” Castleman yelled back.

“Why are they leaving without us? We’re the ones that do the investigation!”

Castleman laughed.

“Tell them to stop. We’re not done here!”

There was another short pause, and then Castleman started swearing and hitting the radio handset against the side of the Humvee in frustration. My turn, to see if an officer talking sense had more effect.

“Cougar 13 …” I needed a call sign. What number do Army commanders take? “Cougar 13, this is EOD 6. Where are you going?”

“EOD 6, Cougar 13. FOB Warrior TOC has fragged us to Mike Echo 4473 2681. VBIED detonation, over.”

“You are our outer security. You aren’t leaving.”

“EOD 6, Cougar 13. Bayonet 23 is going to handle your security.”

VBIEDs—Vehicle-Borne IEDs, pronounced Vee-Beds—always got the command post excited, thus the urgent change of plans. And Cougar 13’s point made sense; Bayonet 23 came with us, after all. Their swap might even have worked under normal circumstances. Tonight, though, there was a bridge, gunfire, and a still-live IED between us and Bayonet 23. If Cougar 13 left, there would be no one holding off the mobs pressing against the security line on this east end of the bridge. We couldn’t disarm bombs and be riot police at the same time.

“Cougar 13, EOD 6. Negative. You are staying put until we’re done with this one. Then you can take us to the VBIED blast site.”

The radio went quiet for a moment. Follow the TOC’s direction? Or disobey their ops center to follow my order from the field? Tension filled the line.

“I’ll call the FOB Warrior Battle Captain myself on my cell phone and let him know what’s happening,” I added.