Juggernaut

She shook out cramps and climbed the ladder. She prodded the hatch open with the muzzle of her rifle.

She lunged up and out. She rolled clear and lay prone.

A wide, flat roof slick with rain. A rusting satellite dish. A couple of air-con units. A water tank. Thick smoke from burning vehicles in the street below. The bitter stink of melting plastic.

Lucy got to her feet dripping rain. She walked along the parapet. A young kid wrestling to reload a massive Dragnov rifle. He looked twelve, thirteen years old.

A gap between buildings. A thirty-foot drop into a garbage-strewn alley. She ran, and vaulted the chasm.

Lucy’s boot clinked spent shell cases. The kid looked round. They stared at each other.

‘Drop it,’ shouted Lucy.

It broke the spell. The kid struggled to work the rifle bolt.

‘Drop the fucking gun.’

The kid chambered the weapon and raised it. Lucy shot him in the chest. A tracer round pierced straight through him like a streak of laser light.

He lay on his back. He wiped rain from his eyes.

She could hear the thrum of incoming choppers. AH-6 Little Bird gun ships ready to lay suppressing fire at six thousand rounds a minute.

She knelt beside the kid. She examined the scorched wound.

‘Can you hear me? Can you understand English?’

The kid smiled. Blood bubbled between his teeth.

‘Fucking whore. Fucking American whore. You bad luck. You die soon.’

She grabbed the kid by his shirt and pulled him to his feet. He drooled blood and saliva. He pulled burnt dollars from the ripped chest-pocket of Lucy’s flak jacket.

He held up the money.

‘My god is greater than your god.’

Lucy threw him over the parapet. He fell three storeys into the wreckage of the burning Humvee, and was lost in flame.

She crouched on the roof and picked wet dollars from rainwater puddles.

Midnight. The Al-Rasheed Hotel

Lucy and her crew in their suite. The room was furnished with leather armchairs and lawn furniture stolen from the Scheherazade Bar on the roof. Stars and stripes nailed to the wall with a couple of bayonets.

A mortar attack had blown the power. A random shell fired over the Zone’s seventeen-foot blast wall had taken out a pylon. The room was lit by candlelight.

The team had stripped down to T-shirts and shorts.

‘Hey,’ said Amanda. ‘I saw this marine sniper on TV the other night. Reporter asked what he felt each time he killed a guy.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Recoil.’

Lucy smiled.

‘Wish I could sleep,’ said Lucy.

‘I got Ambien. Might have some Motrin.’

Amanda fanned herself with a magazine. Her good looks uglified by heavy tattoos and a nose stud.

‘I popped three bombers,’ said Lucy. ‘And NyQuil. Tripping my arse off. Too humid. Just can’t sleep in this heat.’

‘Hear that?’

The distant sound of guys bellowing ‘Living on a Prayer’.

‘Bechtel guys making their own fun until the power’s back on.’

Lucy pulled a fresh Michelob from an ice bucket and ran the cold bottle across her forehead.

Huang, Toon and Voss were asleep on the floor, weapons and flak jackets propped against the wall.

Lucy and Amanda sat in facing armchairs. Money and pills on the table. Half-eaten flatbread and lamb kebab.

Rain lashed the window.

‘Did you see Toon?’ asked Lucy. ‘Did you see him walk into line-of-fire?’

Amanda shrugged. She swigged vodka. ‘We’re coming apart. All of us. My ears are shot. Ringing. It never stops.’

‘I think we’ve used up our luck,’ said Lucy. ‘Playing Russian roulette each time we roll out Assassin’s Gate.’

‘I’ve been broke. I don’t want to be broke any more.’

Amanda’s dad kicked her out when she was seventeen. She slept in a car for a year. Summer. Winter. Parked each night in the lot of a Holiday Inn.

‘Tell me about the guy.’

‘It was a prisoner transport,’ said Amanda. ‘An old guy. Ex-Republican Guard. He told me about a convoy. A bunch of military vehicles escorting an armoured truck. A shipment of stuff taken from the vaults beneath the National Museum days before Baghdad got hammered by Tomahawks and looted to shit. Said they took the truck way out into the desert. Said it was still there.’

‘What was in the truck?’

‘Gold. Lots of gold.’

‘Where is this guy?’

‘Abu Ghraib.’

‘Do you trust him?’

‘I don’t trust anybody.’

A table lamp flickered on and glowed steady.

‘Hey.’

The room powered up. The rising hum of air-con. A beep from the wall phone. A click as the TV returned to standby.

‘Let’s talk to the guy,’ said Lucy. ‘Hear what he has to say.’

She closed her eyes and basked in the breeze as the ceiling fan stirred the air.