Joaquin tried not to feel insulted by this. She barely knew him. To trust him with something of this magnitude… He should feel honored. “I promise I won’t talk about what you tell me with anyone who isn’t in thisroom.”
* * *
It seemedto Mia that she stood on the edge of a precipice. One more step and she’d go over that edge with no way back. But her life wasn’t the only one at stake here. If what had happened at Tell al-Sharruken was at the heart of this, there could be a dozen others, maybe more, whose lives were atrisk.
Could she trust thesemen?
She looked from Joaquin to Julian toMarc.
“We’ll have to share what you tell us with Detective Wu and Old Man Irving, the chief of police, but we can keep a tight lid on it,” Julian said. “We wouldn’t share classified information with the press or anyone in law enforcement who didn’t need to know. We might want to contact sources in the Pentagon to get whatever filesexist.”
“I’m not sure there are files,” Mia said. “There is no official record of what happened that day. The only people who know about it are those who were there and the chain of command that respondedafterward.”
“That bad, huh?” Marc said. “‘Do NotFile.’”
“Yes. Exactly.” Paper trails had been shredded, computer files purged, any mention of what had happened that daydestroyed.
Joaquin leaned closer. “You can trust these guys, Mia, and you can trustme.”
Did she have any otherchoice?
“Do you mind if I write this down?” Julian asked, notepad and pen inhand.
She shook her head—then took the plunge, her pulse ratcheting. “Tell al-Sharruken.”
“Can you spellthat?”
“S-H-A-R-R-U-K-E-N. It’s a place in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, an ancient Assyrian site—sand, old walls, a few stonepillars.”
The men waited for her to goon.
But where should shestart?
“When I joined Bravo Company, my commanding officer, Captain Bennett Powell, a West Point grad, did and said things that were … inappropriate. I reported what was clear sexual harassment to Colonel Frank, who was in command of our brigade, and to our EO rep. They patted me on the head, thanked me for coming forward, and then did nothing.” Mia had felt utterlybetrayed.
“After that, things got worse. Powell called me names in front of the others—Ice Queen, Iron Maiden, bitch, whatever. I found out later that I wasn’t the only woman to complain about him. Other women came to me, confided inme.”
Joaquin muttered something in Spanish. “He sounds like a realasshole.”
“I hope your story ends with him getting his ass kicked,” Marcsaid.
Julian nodded. “Or better yet, hisballs.”
“I wish.” The men’s rage on her behalf came as a kind of affirmation. She hadn’t gotten that from anyone, not even her own parents. They’d told her she should expect harassment working in a male-dominated field—as if succeeding at a job previously reserved for men took away a woman’s right to dignity andrespect.
“When we deployed to Iraq in 2013, I was company XO. I stayed at the FOB—the forward operating base—most of the time, handling administrative tasks while the rest of the company hauled around toilet paper andMREs.”
Powell had used that time away to alienate others from her, degrading her behind her back until his nicknames for her had become widespread at theFOB.
“One day, I came across a couple of E-fours talking about selling something, discussing how much they thought they’d get for it. I thought it was illicit drugs. It turned out to beartifacts.”
Marc gave a low whistle. “Looting.”
Mia nodded. “Powell had been taking a group of a dozen soldiers off base, using the supply company as a kind of cover to look for artifacts. It’s a violation of the code of conduct and international law. It could have gotten us in serious trouble with locals, destroying any goodwill we had left with the nearby communities. I reported it to Colonel Frank. I thought they’d be court-martialed.”
“Let me guess—he didnothing.”
“He yelled at Powell, I think, but Powell denied it and claimed that I had some kind of grudge against him. Colonel Frank buried it.” Mia swallowed, a helpless sense of rage building inside her. “The rest of that deployment was misery. Powell found all kinds of creative ways to get back at me—putting camel spiders in my tent, locking all of the female sanitary supplies in his office so that I had to ask for them each month, excluding me from meetings. Someone put a coffee can full of human feces in mytent.”