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  “Just keep our exterior orderly. We don’t need negative attention,” Elmore said, and departed to catch his flight.

  Billy-C looked at Jack. “Wonder why we can’t find a pig to roast around these parts? I could sure go for some barbecued ribs.”

  Jack looked at the Southern-fried staff sergeant, started to say something but instead blew out a big breath.

  “Eleven hundred, Guns,” Claybaugh said, checking the big white-faced government clock Jack had had mounted over the entrance. That way when he looked up to see who came through the door, he could note the time. Bronco and Jaws hated it because they always showed up at the last minute. Never on Lombardi time.

  “That’s right, you’ve got security duty on that wagon train headed down Fallujah Road,” Jack said. “You boys roll out of the chocks at what, thirteen hundred?”

  “Straight up,” Billy said.

  Jack went to the wall map and took a look at the route.

  “Lots of nasties on that trail,” Jack said.

  “Guaranteed one of those KBR semis hauling bacon and beans going to pop an IED, big as shit,” the staff sergeant said. The tone of his voice told Jack that Billy-C had a little honest worry going on.

  Gunny Valentine put his hand over his boy’s shoulder and gave it a good squeeze. “You got this, dude. Right?”

  “Cotton’s got a team in the other Hummer one truck behind me.” Claybaugh nodded but bit his lip.

  “Keep plenty of interval between you and those trucks. That MRAP out front of the lead truck may find the pressure-plate mines, but not the command-detonated ones. Give yourself room,” Jack said, then thought. “Load your team heavy this trip. Lots of bullets. Throw a two-forty golf machine gun in each truck to back up your Maw Duce. You hit a cross-fire ambush, you can light up both sides of the road.”

  Billy-C looked at the map, then his watch.

  “Hey, brother, you got this!” Jack said, and gave a hug to his staff sergeant, whom he had first met when Billy was a lance corporal in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There Claybaugh had taken his first scalps as a sniper, killing Serbs trying to murder Bosnian Muslims three years after the Bosnian government had signed a treaty. Even today, the border sniping continued. Both Jack and Billy had decided that NATO’s trying to keep that peace was a waste of time.

  Today, those Bosnian Muslims that American troops had protected from Serbian slaughter had joined with other Muslims in Chechnya and the Caucasian region, and infiltrated Iraq as al-Qaeda terrorists, killing Americans.

  “I don’t want to fuck up,” Billy let out, and took a breath. “Why not put Cotton on lead? He’s good, like you.”

  “If I didn’t believe you had your shit in one bag, Billy, you’d be back at Lejeune,” Jack said. “You’re not going to fuck up. What’s to fuck up?”

  “Getting guys killed, that’s what,” Claybaugh said. “Like you said, it’s a real nasty piece of road.”

  “Trust your training, brother,” Jack said, and held on to Claybaugh’s shoulders while looking him in the eyes. “You’re lead because you need the snaps. Everybody’s nervous, first ride out the chute, as Bronco Starr likes to put it.”

  Billy bit his lip. “Believe it or not, I’d feel a lot more confident if I had him and Jaws with me on the guns.”

  “They’re stood down, with me,” Jack said. “They pulled night watch, so they’ve got rack time. Besides, I’m putting them to work painting my black accent wall this afternoon.”

  “Black accent wall?” Billy-C said, and broke a smile.

  “Yeah, this whole side of the hooch,” Jack said, and pointed at the wall that ran the full length of the building.

  “And all that shit in these boxes?” Billy grinned.

  “I got a giant flag with our logo, and all kinds of other good shit,” Jack said. “We’ll have this place looking like a proper Special Operations sniper hooch in no time.”

  Billy smiled. “Home of the Ghosts of Anbar.”

  Then Jack pointed at the center of the intended accent wall, and said, “I’m painting a five-foot Punisher skull right there.”

  “I’d love to be here when Elmore sees it,” Billy said, laughing. “He’ll shit green marbles.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Jack laughed. “We’re warped.”

  Billy looked at the gunny. It felt good to laugh.

  Jack smiled at him. “Got an idea. Grab some monolithic .50 for the duce. It cuts through walls like a buzz saw.”

  “Mind if I take a couple of Barretts, too?” Claybaugh asked. “One for each truck? Load ’em with Raufoss rounds? They’ll bust through all kinds of shit. You never know.”

  “Sounds good,” Jack said. “Take what you need. And never fear, brother. Shit goes south, I’m up with you on com. Holler help, and we’ll roll out the cavalry.”

  —

  Cesare Alosi looked out his office window in the American compound next to the US embassy in Baghdad. Rat-hole city crawling with crap. Like every other third-world nightmare he had ever lived, yet he kept coming back for the money. He liked it better here than Islamabad or Kabul. Nice dinner parties with the American and Allied civilian workers, more and more of whom crowded the Iraqi capital each day. Alosi liked dressing up and dining out. Even here.

  Paris. He loved Paris more than any place on earth. New York was a close second. Maybe he could get her to fly to Paris with him, when he took a month off at the end of this four-month cycle.

  Cesare thumbed through his calendar, counting the weeks, then looked again at the framed photo he had of Liberty Cruz, printed off a snapshot he had taken with his BlackBerry the night he had gone home with her. The lights outside the Washingtonian Hotel gave the long cool woman in the clinging black dress a halo effect as she had flashed a devilish smile for his camera.

  “Not that drunk,” he thought. “She’s into me like wicked whiskey.”

  A smile crept across his face as lurid thoughts of Liberty whirled in his head; her sexy body and his dirty mind left him aroused.

  A knock came at his office door, and the attractive Iraqi girl he had hired as a secretary put her head inside.

  “Sir, I tried to reach Mr. Taché for you, but he has gone for the week with Mr. Decoux,” the girl who went by Irene said. She did not use her Muslim name and held this job in secrecy from her family, who lived south of the Iraqi capital, near Hillah.

  “Where’d they go?” Alosi asked.

  “Mosul and that region along the Tigris,” Irene said. “The girl at their offices said that they had found another trove of privately owned family antiquities, some more than three thousand years old. They hope to purchase the best among them and send them to Paris.”

  “Very good,” Alosi said, and dismissed her. Then he looked on the shelf above his credenza at a small brown-clay oil vase and matching oil lamp that Davet Taché had given him. Two thousand years old, from the Tigris region in Turkey, Monsieur Taché had sent them as tokens to remind Cesare that he and his partner, Jean René Decoux, were not French rug merchants but connoisseurs of fine art objects.

  At a party, Alosi had offhandedly called the two import-export businessmen from Avignon, rug merchants.

  “We trade in art, antiquities, and precious objects,” Davet had tastefully corrected Cesare.

  Alosi liked the two gentlemen from France very much. They were a breath of class in this dreary city.

  He looked back at his phone and checked his watch.

  “No word from that rube, Ray-Dean Blevins?” the Malone-Leyva boss yelled out his open door rather than pushing the intercom button on his desk phone.

  Irene put her pretty head inside Cesare’s office. “Mr. Blevins has just come through the lobby. Should I send him straight in?”

  “Please, and close the door behind him,” Alosi said.

  Blevins came in, looking bad and smelling worse.

/>   “You’re a sight,” Cesare said, and caught a whiff. He waved his hand under his nose, and turned up the fan on his air-conditioning unit. “Your shower broken?”

  “No, sir,” Ray-Dean said, and scratched his crotch. “It’s working fine.”

  “Then you should use it,” Cesare said.

  “We work up a sweat out there, sir,” Blevins said.

  “That’s more than workingman’s sweat,” Cesare said. “You’ve got a whole mixed cocktail of stenches coming off you like an open sewer. Steroids, booze, meth, its waste product seeps out the skin, and stinks.”

  “I don’t have to listen to your insults,” Ray-Dean said, and turned toward the door.

  “Stop!” Cesare ordered. “I could shoot you right here, and there’s not a fucking thing anyone can or would do about it. American legal jurisdiction does not cover us in Iraq, and the local government could give a shit if you or I commit murder or get murdered. So you’d better listen to me when you step in my chambers.”

  Blevins turned back and sagged on one hip, glaring at his boss.

  “And next time I call you to report, I want you freshly showered and wearing something more fragrant than your dirtiest T-shirt and shit-stained pants,” Cesare barked.

  “You called me here, for what?” Ray-Dean said, still sagging on his hip, and now resting the heel of his hand on his .45 pistol strapped to his upper thigh. If the man wanted a gunfight, he would give him one. He hadn’t slept in two days, and had a bad headache from last night’s booze, drugs, and whores.

  “I thought you were going to keep me informed about these MARSOC operators? You claim to be friends with a couple of them,” Cesare said, and put his .45 auto on the desk as he spoke, so Ray-Dean could see it.

  “I said I know a couple of them,” Blevins answered. “I didn’t say I liked any of them. And I sure the fuck never said I had any friends over there.”

  “But you still made a deal with me. What’s their status?” Cesare asked.

  “Security patrols,” Blevins said. “They’re running shotgun for a KBR convoy of tractor-trailers down Fallujah Road this afternoon.”

  “Who all knows about it?” Cesare asked.

  “Like you told me, I make sure the hookers hear about it.” Blevins shrugged.

  “Good,” Cesare said.

  “You know, it doesn’t make sense, you wanting us to compromise those guys, telling those whores classified shit like that,” Blevins said, disgusted.

  “Marginally classified. And who else do you suppose those whores are fucking besides you assholes?” Alosi asked.

  “Iraqi soldiers, cops, a few Allied soldiers, maybe Americans, too. Shit, I don’t know,” Ray-Dean slurred out.

  “Reporting all to al-Qaeda, I suspect,” Cesare added.

  “Then we sure as shit don’t need to be giving them information that can end up killing Americans,” Blevins fired back. “That’s treason.”

  “That’s business,” Alosi corrected his man.

  “What, so we can get more security duties and special operations?” Ray-Dean said.

  Cesare Alosi smiled. “Precisely.”

  “MARSOC and those Army guys stuck on security aren’t in business,” Blevins argued. “They’re not our competition.”

  “They are the competition, you fool!” Alosi snapped.

  Blevins stuck out his jaw and took a grip on his gun, not liking the insults hurled at him by his boss.

  Cesare picked up his .45 and cocked the hammer, not pointing it at Ray-Dean but still sending a message.

  “Cooter,” Alosi said. “That’s what your pals call you, right? Cooter, like a pooter but with a C.”

  “No, sir,” Blevins came back, his lips curled above his brown-rimmed teeth. “It’s Cooder with a D.”

  “Right. Cooder,” Cesare said. “I stand corrected.”

  Then the swarthy boss with his slicked-back black hair and pearly teeth rested his gun’s butt on his desktop, pointed the muzzle straight at Ray-Dean, and explained, “It’s simple economics. As long as the less-expensive Jarheads or Doggies provide adequate security, we sit here making nothing. However, if the Marines or Army look like they cannot adequately protect these caravans of supplies and important people, then the government comes to us. Get it?”

  “I got it a long time ago,” Blevins said, and took his hand off his gun and crossed his arms, still not breaking eye contact with Cesare Alosi. “I’m just saying it ain’t right. What we’re doing. Americans can die from it.”

  “Americans die every day in this war,” Alosi retorted. “Most often because some bonehead fool sends them out underarmed and ill prepared on a poorly planned mission. They’re fighting this war like the cavalry of the old West. Ride out of Fort Apache at dawn, kill Indians, and ride home. Proves nothing and wins nothing. Do they expect to kill all of an ever-increasing army of insurgent soldiers?”

  Ray-Dean took a big breath. “That it, sir?”

  Alosi shook his head. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Blevins started to leave, then turned back at his boss. “I thought Hacksaw and his buddies that’s supposedly so tight with Gunny Valentine might help you out.”

  “Not hardly,” Alosi answered. “They’re not mainlining drugs and fucking Iraqi whores. They may dress like pirates, but unfortunately, they’re too straight for my needs. They’d never compromise their lofty sense of ethics for anyone or any amount of money. Dumb-ass losers.”

  “Then why do you keep them around?” Blevins asked.

  “I have to,” Cesare said. “My boss, the owner of this company, likes them.”

  “Oh.” Blevins nodded.

  “But I always come up with a solution to every kind of problem that gets in my way. Haven’t you noticed?” Cesare smiled. “People get killed on the job every day. That’s why we pay astronomical salaries and keep our queue of ready replacements filled. You just never know when one day’s your last. It’s a dangerous business.”

  “That why Hacksaw and his boys run a lot of duty down by Fallujah and Ramadi? You want them dead?” Blevins asked.

  Cesare shrugged, lowered the hammer on his pistol, and slid it to one side of his desk. He gave Ray-Dean Blevins a cold, narrow smile as he leaned back in his tall, executive-model leather swivel chair.

  “Cooder. Don’t forget. I’ve always got you by the balls. You willfully destroyed our three-hundred-thousand-dollar armored Cadillac Escalade that Jack Valentine stuffed up my ass. Oh, that festers, my man. It festers.

  “I simply dangle it over your head, and that gets you to do anything I need,” Alosi reminded the man. “We can take the cost of that car out of your pay anytime you start sprouting morals and want to quit being my boy, or you can do what I say.”

  “There are limits,” Ray-Dean said.

  “Not around here.” Cesare smirked.

  _ 5 _

  Midday sun sent heat waves dancing off the concrete where four KBR semi-tractor rigs sat as workers running forklifts finished loading the long box trailers with pallets of shrink-wrapped supplies, outbound for delivery to the logistics drop point that served the camps around Fallujah, Ramadi, and Hit.

  Billy Claybaugh had Lance Corporal Rowdy Yates pull across from a sand-tan Cougar MRAP HE where a dozen infantry soldiers and their lieutenant sat in the shade of the six-by-six mine-resistant troop wagon. Cotton Martin’s driver parked the second Hummer alongside the other MARSOC truck.

  The Army lieutenant gave Billy-C a wave with the tip of his index finger off the lip of his helmet. Claybaugh answered him with a hip-low cowboy-style slide of his hand.

  “Go ahead and stretch your legs, boys,” the staff sergeant leading the MARSOC security mission told his Marines, and gave Cotton Martin a sign to dismount, too.

  None of the Marine special operators smoked cigarettes or used tobacco in any forms. They didn�
��t want dependency on nicotine eating at them when they worked in a hide days on end, nor to have effects of the drug making their sights on long-range shots bounce any higher than the low ebb of a slow pulse and calm heartbeat. Like professional athletes, they avoided caffeine, too, and had eating habits that ensured that their bodies remained at peak performance. Free-weight workouts, aerobics, martial arts practice, most of the men held various degrees of black belt, and long runs daily kept them fit and tool-steel hard. No fatsoes or skinny weenies in this outfit. Just trim muscle and clear minds. Jack Valentine had that uncompromising rule, among others, that made his Marines different than any run-of-the-mill hard charger. They looked it, too.

  Most of the infantry soldiers sat in their truck’s shade sucking on high-octane energy drinks and cigarettes, and spitting tobacco juice on the blistering concrete and watching it fry. Even the lieutenant had a lip full of Skoal. As staff sergeants Claybaugh and Martin gathered their cadre of eight Spartans and sat them in the shade of the two Marine Hummers, the soldiers gave them those telltale sideways leers that always say, “So you think you’re hot shit?”

  The Marines knew their shit was righteous and blew off the condescension. Cotton shot the soldiers a slack smile, then turned his back on the mutts.

  Breaking the tension, the lieutenant walked over to the two staff sergeants, and asked, “Who’s in charge?”

  “That’d be me, sir,” Billy said, and put out his hand for the lieutenant, who shook it.

  “You’ve got our channel on your comm link?” the lieutenant asked, pulling a notebook out of his pocket.

  “Roger that, sir,” Billy answered. “Staff Sergeant Martin and I both will have you up on command channel. Just talk, and we hear you. Each member of our team’s on intercom as well, also linked to our operations office. You can patch in, if you like. You want a radio check?”

  The lieutenant shook his head no as he scribbled in his notebook, then said, “We’ll run one when we pull out. I want to make sure the truck drivers have us on comm, too.”