From Baghdad with Love by Jay Kopelman (a court of thorns and roses ebook free .TXT) 📕

The Command Center: No response yet from Dr. Murrani.

The Lava Dogs’ Building: Lava pees when I walk into the room where he’s stashed. He pees now whenever I see him. I think it’s because I usually wake him up, like tonight, and he’s just happy to see me, but one of the guys says it’s a dog’s sign of submission, which bothers me for reasons I don’t have time to pin down.

The Command Center: No response yet from Dr. Murrani.

The Command Center: No response yet from Dr. Murrani.

The Command Center: She has to contact me. She has to. I have 4.2 hours left before I report to the helicopter landing pad, but all I can think about is getting over to the Lava Dogs’ building to see the little guy one more time. There isn’t any more time, though. I let it escape, and now all I have to show for myself is poorly packed gear and a sick feeling down in my gut.

The Lava Dogs have promised to keep him as long as they can, but he’s such a little warrior, they’ll have trouble keeping him quiet when the wrong people are around. He senses enemies right away, and even though you beg him to shut up, try to give him a treat, tell him the person he’s rooing at is a commander who can have him shot, which will hurt, hurt a lot, he gets so worked up, it doesn’t get through.

The landing zone: We leave for Balad at night to avoid detection. But the chopper—a ninety-nine-foot-long Stallion that can travel 180 miles per hour and carry sixteen tons of cargo—makes this whomp whomp whomp so heavy and loud that anyone within ten miles will hear you coming. If you’re smart and don’t want to collect disability pay for hearing loss the rest of your life, you wear earplugs.

As the whomping starts overhead, everyone on board moves around doing things, shifting things, preparing for things. Me, I sit here in the open door and see Lava peeing. A sign of submission. Jeez. I want him to be loyal, but I don’t want him to be submissive to anyone. I want him to survive.

The chopper lifts off. We’ll be flying low. The lights of Camp Fallujah disappear.

PART II

“And to dust you shall return.”

Genesis 3:19

CHAPTER TWELVE

May 2005

Baghdad

David Mack looked over the paperwork again. It couldn’t be legitimate. But Ken Licklider had already given the go-ahead and Brad Ridenour was already on his way in from Kirkurk, so it would have to do.

David had been Ken’s overseas manager in Afghanistan and Iraq for the past three years, which meant he knew how to engineer bridges across the rules as well as anyone. Not that there were many rules to follow around here, which made you crazy sometimes, because a lot of rules got made up along the way, like how much in “fees” you had to pay for certain paperwork, for instance, so you never knew what to expect. You never thought you wanted to follow the rules until there weren’t any to follow.

It wasn’t that the Coalition Provisional Authority didn’t challenge the country with rules; it just hadn’t developed the biceps to enforce them. With the military busy hunting down insurgents and employing every available noninsurgent Iraqi male to do so, too, it was left to the private security companies like Triple Canopy Security to do most of the police work. Only they had other jobs to do. They were hired to protect, not enforce.

On top of that, there were two sets of rules you had to know about: those in Baghdad’s Red Zone and those in the Green Zone.

In the Red Zone the rules were simple—(1) Move fast; (2) Stay alive—and were enforced by whoever possessed the best pyrotechnic talents or drove the fastest armored vehicles.

In the Green Zone, where David stayed at the Triple Canopy compound, the rules took on a more ceremonious air. They had to, because that’s where the center of the universe most recently planted its flag.

The Green Zone of Baghdad—surrounded by reinforced, blast- proof concrete slabs, coils of barbed wire, earthen berms, chain-link fences, and dozens of armed checkpoints, and guarded by helicopters, Abrams tanks, armored Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and foot patrols—was the ultimate gated community. It was a well-protected bubble, a private club that admitted only the new Iraqi elite, including members of the vague ruling authority, coalition partners of one kind or another, and employees of major US consulting companies.

Located in the center of the city, the Green Zone consisted of much former glamour—Saddam Hussein’s former presidential palaces, villas built for former royal family members, stately homes of former Ba’ath party members, former convention centers, former museums, former parks, former parade routes, and former pens for Saddam Hussein’s man-eating lions. There was taxi service within its boundaries, a hospital, barbershops, and two Chinese restaurants run by Iraqis.

If you weren’t lucky enough to get lodging in one of the palaces, you usually stayed in a single-wide trailer surrounded by sandbags. But that was still better than living in the Red Zone, because at least in the Green Zone, everyone spoke English and had access to CNN, so you knew what was going on outside the perimeter.

The Triple Canopy complex David Mack stayed in was a self-contained, walled compound within the self-contained, walled Green Zone. It had its own guard towers inhabited day and night by a foreign security force that watched over the individual housing units, the dining hall, the laundry, the gym, the kennels, and the shipping containers full of ammunition. If you had to stay in Baghdad, this was the place to be.

But things were still dangerous. Mortars came across the Green Zone wall all the time, so the rules, the ones that existed anyway, went with the flow.

There was an e-mail making the rounds of