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