The Walking Dead

His shoes off, Joe Hegner had his feet on the desk, and there was a hole in the heel of his right sock, but there didn't seem time, these days, to call up a driver assigned to the Bureau and the necessary security people and travel downtown to get new pairs. His stick was propped against the desk edge. Many times he had been into police barracks, and he had good friends among the newly recruited officers. He had a rapport with them that verged on love. Most Iraqis living in the goddamn Triangle preferred to go short; see their family half starve from privation, rather than risk signing up and taking the American dollar, but a few were prepared to break the mould of fear. They had such damn awful equipment — shitty vehicles, shitty weapons and shifty barricades round their barracks — but they seemed so cheerful when he was over there, one week in four. For seven days in every month he was out of the embassy in Riyadh, holed up in the protected Green Zone on the Tigris river that split Baghdad, and before he caught the flight back to the Saudi capital, he would make damn certain:- even if he had to get there inside the armour-plated walls of a Main Battle Tank — that he visited policemen in their barracks. There were Agency boys in the Green Zone, and agents from the Bureau, but they never moved off their asses and never went to meet the men at the real front line. He seemed to hear the keening wail of widows, brothers and mothers, as the bodies of policemen were identified — what-was left of them, after the explosion of a liquid fuel tanker. He knew Ar-Ramadi as a place of rare hatred, of particular cruelty.

SitRep, Central Command, Ba'quba: Single suicide-bomber attack. Target was an Iraqi Army recruitment centre — suicide-bomber had joined end of queue and detonated explosives when challenged. Casualty figure not known, but will be 'large': Message Ends.

Thoughts formed in Joe Hegner's mind, and they ran alongside the images he held of the days when he had lived in the rarefied atmosphere of the Green Zone, before his hospitalization, before his convalescence, and before it was confirmed that he could work out of the embassy in Saudi Arabia…A queue outside a grimy building that was set back from concrete blast barriers and sandbag parapets. A line of young and middle-aged men watching uneasily behind them as they shuffled forward with painful slowness. A table with three clerks sitting behind it and a wad of application forms, riffled by an early-morning breeze. A man joined the far end of the line, and perhaps he smiled, as if at peace, and perhaps his clothing was too bulky for the size of his shoulders or the shape of his head, and perhaps the sweat ran on his forehead when the sun was not yet high, and perhaps those in the queue smelt the scent of danger and started to run back, and perhaps a security guard — paid a pittance — had had the courage to charge towards the sweating, overweight, smiling man. But a hand was inside the robe. A finger was on a switch. A bomb detonated. A body disintegrated and many other bodies were mutilated…He knew those young men. They were the secondary field of Joe Hegner's expertise.

SitRep, 'Central Command, Baghdad: Attack on garrison (Coalition Forces) at Abu Ghraib detention complex. Reports still incoming. At least 5, repeat 5, suicide-bombers involved in vehicles and on foot, alongside insurgent ground forces using 88mm mortars, RPG launchers and 50mm' calibre machine-guns. Neither enemy casualties nor Coalition Forces casualties yet known or confirmed, but there are reports of at least two KIA from 101^st Infantry: Message Ends.