Dirty Money ARC Read online

  “She didn’t truck it on home, Davy, fixin’ to help feed her family. She tucked it in her shirt, and ran, looking for more.” He sat on his rucksack, back against the rocky wall, and peeled open the MRE. Not a Big Mac and a beer, but Chicken with Cavatelli. He sighed, stabbed the plastic spoon into the goop that had been warmed to body heat.

  “The kid needs a unit of blood, she needs an xray, she needs an honest to God surgeon to section her bowels- not some half-ass medic in the back of beyond!” He flung the container against the wall, watched it slide down the stone. Weeks of frustration boiled over and tears slid down his cheeks, leaving muddy tracks that melted into his beard.

  Driver had never seen his friend like this, and he crouched, put his arm around his partner, cradled his head against his chest. “Hey. I’ve seen you work, side by side with ‘honest to God’ docs, during the battle for Kandahar.”

  The battle for Kandahar. Justice squeezed his eyes shut. A battle delayed, while HQ personnel took day trips to the front, so they could qualify for their CIB. Officers from Tenth Mountain got Bronze Stars without firing shot.

  After a moment Driver released him, sat beside him, his back against the wall. A situation they were both all too familiar with. “Bob.”

  Justice turned, eyes shining. “What?”

  “How many weeks of training does an 18 Delta get?”

  Justice answered in a monotone. “Fifty nine.”

  “And then where did you go, after that, while I was at Language School?”

  “You know where I went. VCU. The Medical Center at Virginia Commonwealth.”

  Where his group worked 12-hour shifts in the ER, then rotated through the surgical trauma intensive care unit, the operating rooms, the Evans-Haynes Burn Center, through labor and delivery.

  Honing their skills in advanced wound care, suturing, intravenous access, emergency airway management.

  “And how many weeks was that?”

  Justice used a thumb to wipe his eyes. “Forty nine. What’s your point?”

  “My point is don’t sell yourself short. There’s not a trauma surgeon on the planet who can do more with less. Quit feeling sorry for yourself, and let’s call in a bird, medevac her to a hospital.”

  “For an Afghan kid? Ain’t no way they’ll authorize that.”

  Driver popped his temple with his palm. “Oh, gee, I guess I’m confused. I thought it was General Sayaaf in need of emergency evacuation to a field hospital.” He crouched over his computer. “Let me fire off my latest brotherly update, and then we’ll call in some help for your little girl.”

  Dear Penny,

  This is the first chance I got to write. Me and Justice are still chasing the bad guys in an area up near the Pakistan border. I can’t tell you more, or I’d have to shoot you. (ha ha)

  My Central Asian language skills have stood us in good stead (not sure what a stead is, but it sounds right). Justice’s choice of Spanish for his intensive language training may have been easier than mine, but we have yet to have the opportunity for him to order a burrito. Plus, cerveza is harder to find in a Muslim country than holy water!

  He used his Spanish when we were in the Philippines, although I picked up Tagalog fast enough to be better at talking with the more remote natives than he was. On the other hand, he was better than me at sweet-talking the ladies.

  Neither of us have had much use for those skills here. The women are fantastically beautiful, but they are pretty much wrapped up from head to foot, and have fathers, brothers, and every sort of cousin, who are even more heavily armed than us!

  Speaking of women (a favorite subject), I am so proud of you, Penny, soldiering on, all alone, after Mom’s passing. I know it can’t have been easy. And carrying a 4.0! I was tempted to shoot myself in the foot, just so I could be there for your graduation.

  Bob got in a bit of trouble a few weeks ago; the CIA advance team has millions in U.S. currency lying around in cardboard boxes. They use it to bribe the Northern ‘Alliance’.

  Only he didn’t like announcing our arrival with the very noisy 4 wheel transportation we have, so he pilfered a few bundles of greenbacks, and bought a couple of the finest horses around.

  He just got back from a mission of mercy, and he’s kind of down, so we gotta talk.

  Love Ya,

  D.

  He encrypted the e-mail and sent it, then called HQ at Kabul. Justice salvaged the dessert pack from the mess and ate the cookies while he listened to Driver lie.

  Later, in the village, they watched the helicopter lift off. Driver put his hand on Justice’s shoulder. “You realize, when they find out the patient’s not General Sayaaf, our asses will be in a sling.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll cover yours, Kemosabe; my list of dust-ups with Army bureaucracy goes all the way back to the day I signed up. The enlistment form had a line for RACE, and the only answer I could come up with was HUMAN. So, tough, if they don’t like it. Meantimes, that child just might have a chance to grow up.”

  Chapter 6

  “Ow! Sumbitch; this one’s hot!” Bumpsy dropped the box, then yanked his shirt cuffs down, and launched the container up into the garage. It hit the side of the truck, the top flew off, and forty bundles of bills skittered across the floor. He clambered up from the basement vault, opened the truck door, and grabbed the cell phone from its dashboard holster. “Start the damn truck up, Howie, we’re done here.” He thumbed the speed dial for Mr. Tomczak, slumbering in air conditioned comfort at the al Rashid Hotel.

  Howie looked longingly at the intact stacks at his feet. “There’s still a bunch left.”

  Bumpsy punched his arm. “Don’t get greedy. RoachMobile catches fire, you ain’t a rich man no more. Padlock the hatch, Chick, and let’s get the hell outta here!”

  Chapter 7

  Saving the child broke the barrier of suspicion all Afghans have of outsiders; a distrust that stretches back millennia. Alexander encountered it three centuries before the birth of Christ, as did the British in the nineteenth, and the Russians in the twentieth. They have good reason to be wary; nobody comes to Afghanistan with altruistic intent.

  When the tribal chieftain returned with his convalescing grandchild, he immediately slaughtered a sheep to honor the man who had saved her. The Afghans watched with eager anticipation to see how this American dealt with the traditional delicacy.

  Justice did not disappoint, and it was dispatched with a theatrical display that Driver had come to expect from his friend. They’d eaten worse at S.E.R.E. School. After roadkill possum marinated under a Carolina sun, a sheep’s eyeball was a nuanced, if chewy, morsel. Who in the Special Forces hadn’t heard of this object served to favored guests throughout the Middle East and Central Asia?

  First day of school, Survival Evasion Resistance Escape, the Second Platoon, Alpha Company, marched, full combat gear and an eighty pound pack, five hours deep into the area classified as Varied Terrain. There they would endure three weeks of deprivation and pursuit, followed by the inevitable capture and torture that went by the more politically correct name ‘interrogation’.

  The instructor was as lean and leathery as a strip of beef jerky. “OK, peoples. Listen up, ‘cause what I’m gonna learn you today will save your ass, you find youselfs alone with the enemy.” He strolled back and forth in front of the men seated on the sun-splintered bleachers. His old-style cammies were starched and tailored to fit close as a second skin and his Smokey the Bear hat was tilted low over his eyes.

  The hat was non-reg, but with thirty seven years in, he didn’t give a good God Damn. The sergeant carried a length of hickory, tipped at one end by a .30 cal. shell casing and a .50 at the other, both polished to a golden shine. He waved it at the horizon.

  “Them hills is a grocery store, you know where to look. You set a heathen in the supermarket, he’s liable to eat powered soap and drink him some bleach. ‘cause he don’t know what's eatable, and what’s not. Allee same-same out here. You can fill your belly, or make it turn
on you.”

  He paused, preparing the platoon for the line that he used every training cycle. “You know what we called Green Berets in ‘nam? Snake eaters.” He swung his gaze across his victims. “Before this school is out, you mens will bear that name.” Justice’s eyes rolled up and he zoned out. He’d already eaten the snake.

  In the summer of his eighth year Papaw and Mamaw introduced him to his great-grandmother. She lived in the Cherokee National Forest, up in the eastern corner of Tennessee, in a cabin her father built on land he'd cleared.

  His Meemaw met the car in the yard at the end of the lane that was at the end of a single-track dirt road. Her son bent and hugged her; a slim, dark woman not much taller than her great-grandson. Her daughter-in-law kissed her cheek, and the old woman studied the boy. The loudest sound was the ticking of the hot motor in the Chevrolet.

  The old woman reached out a gnarled hand, cupped his chin, and returned his stare. She saw the blood of her father and the blood of her mother carried on, ran strong and pure through the veins of this new generation. After a long minute they both blinked and she smiled. “I can feel the wild, risin’ off’n him like a summer’s sun on a black rock.” She smoothed his dark hair, then ruffled it. She turned to her son. “Got your father’s eyes. We’ll do fine.”

  Justice called her Meemaw and she called him Boy. They slept in a rope bed on a corn shuck mattress under a quilt she’d sewn a half century earlier. He asked about the twin ferrotypes above the hearth. A black man in uniform, three big stripes on his arm, and a sword at his side. And a stocky woman, a shade lighter, high cheekbones and obsidian eyes, dressed in buckskin.

  “Thems my Maw and Paw. He come back from his war in Cuba, took a Cherokee for his wife. Bought a hunnert acres with his muster out pay.” She reached for a bible bound in black leather. “This here’s his Book.”

  Meemaw opened the worn cover. Tucked inside was a small sepia photograph of a doughboy, stiffly posed with a Model 1903 Springfield rifle. “Thet thar’s Delaney Justice, your Peepaw. Come home from France, started a sawmill, paid my Paw fifty dollars for three thousand foot of white oak. I come with the logs. His people disavowed him, marryin’ a niggah-injun.” She closed the bible, returned it beside the bed, raised her eyes to her parent’s portraits. “Come settle up time, it ain’t whut you is, it’s who you be, counts with the Creator.”

  She taught him to stalk, to sit silent for hours at a time, watching the forest come to life with the dawn. To tickle trout, to dowse, to snare, to shape shift.

  She also took a switch to him when he stepped out of line, saying, ”Iffen you peart off to me agin, I’ll warp you upside the haid.”

  His grandparents returned a week later. “Can I stay?” he pled, and he did, another month, until the schoolhouse called.

  For the next seven summers he returned to study in that hunnert acre classroom. It was the Army taught him how to kill another man.

  Chapter 8

  Goddamn power had gone down at dusk, and the backup had yet to kick in. Major Baer lay sweating in the dark, and reflected on his situation. One day knocking back six figures and two martini lunches, the next a Weekend Warrior mired in the futility of ‘Bringing Order to Chaos’ on National Guard pay. Ex Army Sergeants making more than me, for chrissakes, working as glorified bodyguards.

  He’d overheard Cortez and another motor pool buddy, talking about a black market for military equipment operating out of an empty hangar at the airport. Backhoes, forklifts going in one door Army green, coming out the other bright yellow. He’d love to get a piece of that action.

  Maybe he could cut papers on a few cargo containers of high ticket items, then find a way to divert them into the civilian economy. He had no idea of how that part worked; in his world the robbing was done with a fountain pen. Cortez would know. Maybe. . .

  His fluorescent desk lamp flickered, then came on. Power’s back. Now I’ll have to get out of bed and turn the damn thing off. He did, then made a trip to the can, and when he returned he was no longer sleepy.

  He settled at his desk, turned the light back on, and took advantage of the sporadic power to go online. Baer called up his mailbox, deleted the junk, read Vanguard’s Week in Review and Motley Fool, saved the one from his secretary for last.

  As he read the blood drained from his face. His skin prickled, and sour sweat poured from his armpits. Breathing was difficult, and he felt dizzy.

  Dear Curt;

  What a day!

  You’ll hear it on the news in the morning- afternoon, I guess over there, but the s*** has hit the fan. Our small part in the Big Oil scandal has come back to bite us on the a**.

  I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we have been charged with ’accounting irregularities’, and it looks like the company is going down in flames. Forget about your 401(k), and the stock option, because trading has been suspended. And don’t look for a golden parachute. Your Father-in-law came by with the list of senior executives, and it didn’t have your name on it. He seemed to think it was funny; what is that all about?

  If that isn’t bad enough, your wife was in here, cleaning out your desk, and she found, well, some embarrassing items. I think you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, she confronted me and I had to tell her about us. So you can expect a s***storm from that direction.

  And, well, I guess no time like the present to tell you the rest. Since you went over there I started seeing someone else, that young guy on the fifth floor, has the cute blue BMW? He got an offer from Goldman Sachs, and can take me along as his P.A. So, uhm, it was fun while it lasted, Big Bear, but, well.

  Goodbye.

  Liz.

  Baer stared at the screen, re-read the letter twice, then balled a fist and slammed it down on the keyboard. He shoved his chair back, ripped the computer from its connections, and let loose a primal roar as he threw it against the wall, where it exploded with the force of a grenade.

  A vein throbbed in his temple and his vision blurred. He put a hand on the edge of the desk and a finger against his neck. His pulse pounded. He slumped in the chair, put his head between his knees. Somehow he needed to bring order to his own chaos.

  Salvation arrived as a hammering on his door. The contractor Tomczak was yelling, “Major! Wake up; the garage is on fire!”

  Chapter 9

  While the rest of his platoon was learning about edible wildlife at S.E.R.E. School, Justice was still daydreaming about summers in the hills of eastern Tennessee, learning which snakes were good, because they caught rats in the corn crib, and which to avoid altogether. And, of course, how to prepare them for dinner. After that summer he liked to tease his grandmother, saying her fried chicken was goood! Tasted just like rattlesnake.

  Driver dug an elbow in his ribs. “Check this out.”

  The instructor had just put a pair of five-gallon pails in front of the bleachers. “Now, any of you peoples know what a Annelidea is? No, it ain’t them two sisters, dance at the Topkat Club. It’s your common earthworm.” The sergeant raised a plastic pail and tilted it toward the men. He groped in the moist topsoil, came up with a handful of dirt and worms, which he held for a moment, then dropped back into the container.

  “Put them in a bucket of water for a few minutes, them worms will clean theyselfes out.” He plunged his hand in the second bucket, lifted a fistful of the slimy creatures out of the water. He let all but one slither back into the container.

  The sergeant held the wriggling, six-inch long worm between his finger and thumb. “After which you can eat them raw.” Which he did, eliciting groans from his audience.

  “Ain’t that tasty, though. And gots more pro-teen than a beefsteak.” He smacked his lips theatrically, then pushed the pail toward the bleachers with his foot. “Plenty more here, troop. Come on down. Don’t be shy; we will be here until every last one of you peoples takes him a turn.”

  The platoon had been a unit long enough to know that Justice was the one to turn to in times of indecision. Not t
hat he always made the right choice; but, whatever he did, it brought enlightenment, and often amusement to the moment.

  As for Justice, he recalled a time in third grade, when a girl had dared him to eat a worm.

  “Been thar, done that,” he said, and made his way down from the bleachers.

  —o—

  “Been whar, done whut?” Driver teased. “You sleeping, or you doing preflight?”

  Justice shook off his reverie, saw he was still in Afghanistan. “I ain’t sleepin’; I just ain’t here.” He had the Pointer half-assembled for its morning recon flight, and had drifted off, thinking about the little Pashtun girl and his great grandmother, about how their two worlds were a lot more alike than the one he and Davy were currently operating in.

  He sighed, got back to the task at hand. The eight and a half pound drone carried a low-light TV camera and served as an ‘eye in the sky’ for forward operating troops.

  Driver launched, then settled against a rock, and watched the little screen as he worked the twin joysticks. For a veteran video gamer, flying the UAV was, literally, child’s play.

  The Pointer flew in a lazy racetrack pattern a thousand feet above the Afghan plain. To a casual observer it looked more like a buzzard than an aircraft. Driver handed off to his partner. “Try not to crash my toy,” he said, and connected his laptop to the sat link. He had a backdoor trap from the USSOCOM host to a server in Holland; his private e-mail connection to his sister.

  Dateline Shaleville, PA: (like Afghanistan, the Back of Beyond.)

  Hey BigBro,

  I hope, like that sucky disco hit, you are stayin’ alive over there.

  I’m took a Comparative Religion course as an elective. I figure since you are risking your life for a bunch of Muslims, I should at least learn about their beliefs. It was really interesting, and had me questioning my faith for the first time. So far faith is holding its own. There was this one kid in the class, a born again; kept asking if I found Jesus. I said I didn’t know He was lost, but I’d help him go look for Him. Needless to say, he didn’t think it was funny.