Chris Mulhern sits in a fifth-floor office in west Baghdad, having just completed an 11-hour flight from Los Angeles to London, a five-hour jaunt to Jordan and then a 90-minute hop across the desert to the Iraqi capital. It is that final leg that gives Mulhern a taste of what lies ahead. As the pilot begins his descent into Baghdad airport (put your tray tables in their locked-and-loaded position), he takes the plane into a maneuver called "the corkscrew," a tight downward spiral from about 1,000 ft.--in theory, steep enough to throw off the heat-seeking missiles sometimes launched by insurgents below.
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