Dirty Money ARC Read online

  Dirty Money

  A Bob Justice Thriller

  By

  Deforest Day

  A moral compass always points True North.

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  DeforestDay.com

  Copyright © 2018Deforest Day

  [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

  Table of contents

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Prologue

  In the pitch black night a smoke-choked voice swore. “Damn! That’s my hand you’re stepping on.”

  “Then quit grabbing my leg.”

  “It feels like my ear’s tore off. Can you see if it’s bleeding?”

  “I can’t see jack shit. Gimme the flashlight.”

  Ears ringing, lungs aching from the explosion, the three exterminators stumbled to the RoachMobile and its thousand gallons of toxic chemicals.

  The truck sat in the midst of a blizzard. Burning embers, sparkling like fireflies on a summer night, swirled up from a gaping hole in the garage floor.

  The leader snatched a fragment of paper in mid air. He held it in front of the flashlight, saw Ben Franklin’s wry smile and the letters ONE HUND. “Money.”

  Chapter 1

  Afghanistan

  Dawn rose above the Anjuman Pass, killing the frost and warming two men, lying cougar-quiet, on the Afghan mountainside.

  The sun spilled down the cliffs, chasing shadows across the Panjshir Valley. The pale light crept into the mouth of a man-made cavern..

  A wizened imam shuffled into view, stretching, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He buttoned his chapan against the chill, then placed his hands on his knees and coughed, spat into the dust. Clearing his throat, he raised his head and his voice and gave the call to prayer. Turning toward the holy city, he unrolled a tattered carpet.

  Fifteen Pashtun tribesmen joined him, laid aside their AK-47s and RPGs, and knelt in the first prayer of the day. Allah be willing, four more pauses would follow before sunset. And each time, after the ritual Salat, they would offer Du'a, a supplication to Allah for the destruction of the infidels raining death upon their brethren.

  A thousand meters above the encampment one of those infidels studied the sixteen men through the scope on his .308 Remington. “I cain't tell one from another at this range.” Sergeant Justice turned his head, watched his partner flip through a booklet of laminated cards. “Kin you make him out?”

  “If Abu el Zahed is here, he’s late for church.” Sergeant Driver studied the card. One of forty, thirteen of which now had a black X through the photograph. He put his eye back to the spotting scope. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Your got the telephone, kemosabe. I’m just the shooter.”

  Prayers ended, activity began. A Honda generator sputtered, coughed, came to life. Its rhythmic clatter echoed off the cliffs. Batteries for cell phones and rocket launchers were recharged. Truck engines turned over, complaining as the night-thickened oil rose from crankcase to piston wall. Smoldering camel dung fires were stirred back to life. The greasy aroma of roasting mutton rose above the valley.

  A burst of encrypted data also rose, linking up with a satellite. Driver folded the dish and packed the bulky Inmarsat phone, then settled once more behind his scope. “Four minutes to Armageddon,” he said, and watched the tableau below.

  “Hope Allah done laid on an extra supply of virgins today,” was his partner’s reply.

  Nine miles overhead a pilot made his final delivery of the night, turned in a lazy arc, and headed back to the island of Diego Garcia.

  Four minutes later a thousand pounds of laser-directed death exploded at the mouth of the cave. The cadre of Taliban fighters became a red mist and the trucks became their funeral pyre.

  Driver worked the kinks from his shoulders and neck. They had been lying on the cold and rocky slope for five hours, waiting for dawn. He rose to his knees, and shoved a hand inside the coarse woolen shirt, searching for his iPod.

  Justice grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t be impetuous.” Driver smiled at the word as he dropped back to his belly. His partner explained, “Maybe ol’ Abu wasn’t as churchified as his boys. Let’s wait a bit, see if anyone else crawls outta that cave.”

  The only movement in the valley was the pillar of oily smoke roiling up from the burning trucks. In the still mountain air the barest hint of sound leaked from Driver’s headphones. He swung the scope across the wreckage and began to sing in a toneless whisper. “Here come old flat top.”

  Justice set aside his reverie of a Tennessee summer, and welded the butt stock to his cheek, found Old Flat Top. He didn’t know what grooving up slowly meant, but he knew the man emerging from the cave had a twenty five million dollar price on his head. Too bad Special Forces soldiers can't collect. “Range?”

  Driver lased the target. “935 meters.” The outer edge of the Remington’s killing distance. A Barrett .50 cal. doubles the range, but triples the weight. Fine if you’re hunting light armor and radar installations, not so good on smaller, swifter game. Justice called the Barrett a butcher’s knife, and his M24 a scalpel.

  He studied the sun-warmed air, shimmering in the half-mile between his weapon and the man they had hunted for a week. The ripples in the mirage followed the direction of the breeze.

  After tens of thousands of rounds fired on the range, the computations become instinctive, and Justice dialed in four c
licks of windage. At a hundred meters four clicks is an inch; the only difference being the bullet enters the right ventricle instead of the left. At this distance the difference was a startled man or a dead one.

  Driver tweaked his spotting scope slightly out of focus. To see the vapor trail of the bullet, follow its path, tell his shooter how to adjust for the second shot, if he missed with the first. He knew Justice would not miss with the first. He just liked to watch.

  The sniper drew a long slow breath, held, exhaled, put the reticule on Center of Mass, anticipated the hiatus between heartbeats, squeeeezed.

  Driver saw the shalwar pucker, then ruffle as the bullet entered the target’s chest, and the man went down like an empty tent with the poles kicked out.

  They had been together for the better part of a decade, and went about their after-action duties like an old married couple, washing and drying the dinner dishes. Here, in their fragment of the endless war, it meant packing the gear, policing the area, picking up brass and MRE pouches, leaving no trace of their passage.

  Chapter 2

  Erbil, Iraq

  The same sun rose above a marble and gold palace, once an expression of Saddam Hussein's authority, and now the home of the U.S. Consulate. Consisting of dozens of buildings spread across hundreds of acres, it has first been heavily damaged by the war, and then looted by Iraqi citizens.

  Never one to pass up an opportunity, American politicians and private contractors conspired to repair the damage at taxpayer's expense.

  Sergeant Ricardo Cortez set aside a pile of spare parts requisitions when a tow truck returned what was left of a Humvee to the motor pool. Sgt. Ellen Taggert and three document cases were still inside.

  He both saw and seized the opportunity. Sgt. Cortez extracted the containers from the twisted wreckage, and cleaned off the gore as best he could, then carried the sealed and tamper-proof boxes to Battalion HQ. Pilfering spare parts from the motor pool paled beside the chance to steal backhoes and dozers.

  0600 found Sergeant Cortez waiting outside the Office of Civil Affairs in the left half of the presidential palace. The right half was a pile of rubble, thanks to either American air strikes, or ISIS artillery.

  Sgts. Jackie Brunel and Tunisia Owens strolled down the hallway, carrying containers of coffee and keys to the door.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said, and handed them each a small bottle labeled with the distinctive linked C’s and Chanel No.5 in gold. “I’m guessin’ it’s counterfeit, but hey; it’s the thought that counts, right? Ricky Cortez, at your service.” He lifted the tamper-proof boxes, and followed the two women inside. “I understand there’s gonna be an opening for an E-8.”

  The two NCO’s, an E-5 and an E-6, exchanged glances. Tunisia said, “Say what?”

  “Oh, you haven’t heard? Your top kick took a short cut on her way back from the airport. With these.” He poked the boxes with his foot, and surveyed the office, found a desk with a SGT. ELLEN TAGGERT nameplate. “A short cut cut short by a twenty-year-old anti-tank mine, buried in the drifted sand. Is this a crazy country, or what.”

  He settled in Sergeant Taggert's chair, turned the nameplate face down, and offered the girls a disarming grin. “I can get you French perfume, German beer, Scotch whiskey, and some awesome Algerian hash.” He touched a key and the monitor came to life. “What’s the lady’s password?”

  Jackie and Tunisia were Regular Army, and Sgt. Taggert was both National Guard and an overbearing bitch, so the prospect of an international bazaar of contraband over-rode any sense of remorse for their First Sergeant. That the Major had been boning her made it double-nice.

  Over the next hour, before the arrival of Major Curtis Baer, the Battalion’s Executive Officer, Jackie and Tunisia filled Ricky in on their duties while they sorted the day’s document drop. Mercifully, only the outside of the aluminum cases wore the rust-colored reminder of Sgt. Taggert.

  They carried the Dailies into the Major’s office, and sorted them in three piles between the silver picture frames guarding the corners of the desk.

  Cortez checked them out. Plate, not sterling. The one held a color photo of a fat lady and two very cute teen age girls. Twins by the looks of it, and most likely related to man in the other photo.

  Number 40, down in a three point stance, ready to knock you on your ass from his linebacker position. Tunisia said that was Major Baer, from back in his college days.

  Cortez smiled. He wondered what kind of a man had a picture of himself on his desk. One, most likely, that needed to impress you with what he had once been. They said the Major was National Guard. Even better.

  Curtis Baer strode into the office and removed his helmet, placed it beside the others in front of the air conditioning vent. With luck the sweat-soaked liner would dry before the day’s list of SNAFU’s required him to leave the building. At least the sporadic power was on, and the icy air was a welcome change from the cloudless, endless heat outside.

  He pulled a handful of baby wipes from the dispenser on Ellen’s desk and ran them over his shaved head. Every day brought a fresh influx of stateside contractors, and every day the goddamn chaos grew exponentially. Enough to make a sane man tear his hair. If he had any. Twenty years after the first clusterfuck, a new administration had vowed to get it right. This time.

  He looked at the noncom in the-grease-stained cammies, typing away at Sergeant Taggert’s computer. “Where’s Ellen? Who the hell are you?

  Chapter 3

  Bob Justice met Davy Driver at Ft. Benning, two young soldiers looking for excitement. Justice's father had earned the yellow and black Ranger tab, and he was already stationed at Benning, so what the heck. Way he heard it, the training wasn’t all that different from his boyhood years, back in the hills ‘n’ hollers of Eastern Tennessee.

  A computer paired him with Davy Driver, a city-bred Yankee with the lean frame of a distance runner. The first night, sorting their gear, stretching fresh sheets on their racks, Driver showed Justice a snapshot of his mom and his kid sister. Said the enlistment bonus had gone into Penny’s college fund, and the recruiter’s promise of adventure turned out to be four years of debugging encryption software for command and control networks. He’d heard Rangers spent time in exotic places, so he put in an application, and his Lieutenant gave him a Letter of Recommendation.

  Justice showed Driver the letter from his own platoon leader. Asked if he knew the word ‘impetuous’.

  Driver shook his head, found his laptop in his ditty bag. Its dictionary said that Justice was ‘rashly energetic’. The word implied ‘vehement impulsiveness’.

  “You ain’t much help.”

  “Means you don’t look before you leap.”

  “Yeah? Where’s the fun in that?”

  —o—

  The stink of burning flesh and tires rose from the valley floor. Driver secured the laser range finder and his spotting scope in their hard cases. “Your mention of ‘impetuous’ just now reminded me of a question I never asked. You were a two-stripe that first day of Ranger School. I thought we needed three to apply.”

  ”Less’n you got a waiver.” Justice removed the bolt from his rifle and deployed the cleaning gear. On the battlefield, cleaning your weapon was like sleep; you grabbed it every chance you got. “You remember the One Shot?”

  “Sniper bar; full of prima donnas. Techies like me got the hairy eyeball. We did our drinking in a place with Euro Techno Ska and a wifi connection.”

  “Hey, it’s only natural when you’re better than everyone else, you tend to congregate with your own kind.”

  “Screw you, too. What’s the One Shot got to do with it?”

  Justice ran a brass brush through the bore, used Hoppes No. 9, now that there wasn’t anyone within ten klicks to be drawn by the tangy smell. Others swore by Sweet’s, said it did a better job of removing copper, but he liked Hoppe’s because that signature smell always brought back memories of Papaw, teaching his six year old grandson how to shoot.
>
  He lifted the small brown bottle, drew Davy’s eye to it. “It’s the smell of this that made me think of the One Shot. Because the whole damn bar reeked of bore cleaner and smokeless powder. Had to; everyone in the place had spent all day running rounds through rifles, then doing the same with brushes and patches saturated in Hoppes and Sweets. Our hair, our clothes, our very souls smelled of the solvents of our profession.”

  Driver dropped cross-legged beside his partner, and began to clean his unfired M16. The Afghan dust could be as deadly as an ISIS bullet. “‘Our very souls smelled of solvents’. Aren't you the Renaissance Man! Not only a sniper and a medic, but a poet-philosopher as well.”

  Justice winked at his spotter. “That last is a bit was wrote by some fella puttin’ on airs for a barmaid he was courtin’.” He began to reassemble his rifle. “The night before I did my final qualification shoot, I had one beer at the One Shot, got a pep talk from the old Master Sergeant runs the place, and headed for the sack.

  That’s when I ran into a girl I wish I hadn’t. Because her daddy’s been after my ass ever since.” He held the rifle up to the morning sun and squinted through a bore shining like quicksilver. Saw the single dawn-to-dusk light casting cold shadows on the gravel parking lot.

  Justice was cold sober when he walked out of the bar. The girl in the lot wasn’t. But then she also wasn’t going to take up arms against a one inch bullseye a thousand meters down range.

  Justice had no idea of what she was planning, but was pretty sure it did not involve the three civilians wrestling her into a rust-colored crew cab. She had glazed eyes, and vomit on her breath, and appeared a few birthdays shy of drinking age.

  She also looked familiar. An Army Brat, part of the teenage pack that hung around the PX, flirting with danger. Leave it go, he thought. Ain’t none of your concern. Then his long-dead Meemaw whispered in his ear.