Betrayal (4 page)

“So what did he offer?”

“Well, first, a low bid, but that was basically because he was clueless and didn’t know what it was worth. But the main thing was time. He promised to have almost a hundred and fifty men on the ground out here within two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”

“Two weeks.”

They walked on for a few more steps, before Evan couldn’t help himself. “How was he going to do that? What was he going to pay them with? In fact, who was he going to hire? Did you guys have a hundred and fifty employees in San Francisco you could fly out here?”

Nolan howled out a laugh. “Are you kidding? He had three employees in San Francisco. And he’d paid them off of his credit cards in June. It was the end of the road for him if this didn’t work. But it did.”

“How’d that happen?”

They’d come almost to the checkpoint while the traffic hadn’t budged, and Nolan stopped and faced Evan. “That’s the great part. Jack didn’t have any more credit. Nobody would lend him any more money back home, so he flew back here and convinced the CPA that they needed to lend him two million dollars against his first payment on the contract.”

“Two million dollars?”

“In cash,” Nolan said. “In new hundred dollar bills. So Jack packed ’em all up in a suitcase and flew to Jerusalem, where he deposited it all in the bank, then called me and told me to get my ass over here. He was in business.”

At the gate, in spite of the crowd pressing up to get admitted, Nolan flashed his creds and the two men breezed their way through the CPA checkpoint—even the grunt guards seemed to know who he was. He and Evan crossed an enormous, open, tank-studded courtyard—at least a couple of hundred yards on a side—that fronted a grandiose white palacelike structure that, up close, bore silent witness to the bombardment that had rained upon the city in the past months—windows still blown out, the walls pocked with craters from shells, bullets, and shrapnel.

Inside the main building, in the enormous open lobby, pandemonium reigned. In a Babel of tongues, military uniforms mingled with business suits and
dishdashas
as half a thousand men jostled and shoved for position in one of the lines. Each line wended its way to one of the makeshift folding tables that apparently controlled access to the inner sanctum of Bremer and his senior staff. The noise, the intensity, the hundred-plus temperature, and the general stench of humanity assaulted Evan’s senses as soon as he passed through the front door.

To all appearances, Nolan was immune to all of it. He hadn’t gone three steps into the lobby when he plucked Evan’s sleeve and pointed to their right. So they hugged the back wall, skirting most of the madness and making progress toward a wide marble staircase that led down. The crowd on the stairs was far less dense here than in the room behind them.

“What’s all that about?” Evan asked as soon as he could be heard.

Nolan stopped at the bottom step. “Those folks,” he said, “are basically the ones who got here a day late and a dollar short. I’d say they’re Jack’s competitors, except most of ’em are angling for subcontracts with the big boys. Basically, the entire country’s for sale and Bremer’s trying to administer all the deals from this building, from those tables, each of which represents a different ministry, if you can believe that. Seventeen, twenty of ’em. I don’t know. And with, as maybe you can see, mixed results. Everybody wants a piece. Thank Christ we’re beyond that stage. Fucking bedlam, isn’t it?”

But he didn’t wait for an answer. Turning, Nolan continued along the wall, Evan tagging behind him, the crowd gradually thinning around them the farther they went along the hallway. After thirty yards or so, finally, they turned a corner. Another long corridor stretched out before them, startlingly untraveled. A man in a military uniform sat at a lone table a little more than midway along, and three other men, apparently civilians, stood in front of him. But otherwise the hallway was empty. The noise and craziness behind them still echoed, but suddenly Evan felt psychically removed from it in spite of the fact that there was still a terrible odor of human waste and—even with holes where the windows should have been—no ventilation.

Nolan never slowed down. If anything, checking his watch, he glanced up at the window openings high in the wall and speeded up. But as they approached the desk, he put out a hand to stop their progress and swore.

“What’s up?” Evan asked.

Nolan swore again and came to a dead stop. “It would be Charlie Tucker when we’re in a hurry. Maybe your sergeant should’ve taken my hundred-dollar bet.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s a twerp. Senior Auditor for Aviation Issues. I think back home he was a librarian. Here, he’s a bean counter, but mostly he’s a pain in the ass for people like Jack and me who are actually trying to do some good and make things happen.” But Evan was starting to understand that Nolan wasn’t the type of guy to brood about stuff like Charlie Tucker or anything else. He pasted on a brave smile. “But hey,” he said, “that’s why they pay us the big bucks, right? We get it done.”

In the short time it took them to walk to the desk, Major Tucker had processed one of the three men who’d been standing in front of his desk. As Nolan got closer, the man in the back of the line turned and took a step toward them and bowed slightly. “Mr. Nolan,” he said in accented English, “how are you, sir?”

“Kuvan!” From the apparently genuine enthusiasm, Kuvan might have been Nolan’s best friend from childhood. Kuvan seemed to be in his early thirties. The face was light-skinned, bisected by a prominent hooked nose, and featured the usual Iraqi mustache. Nolan came up to him, arms extended, grabbed him by both shoulders, and the two men seemed to rub noses with one another. They then exchanged what Evan had already come to recognize as the standard Muslim praises to the Prophet, after which Nolan continued. “Kuvan Krekar, this here is Second Lieutenant Evan Scholler, California Army National Guard. He’s only been here a few weeks and I’m trying to make him feel at home.” Then, to Evan: “Kuvan helped us with some of our Filipino personnel down at BIAP. He’s a genius at finding people who want to work.”

As Krekar put out a hand and offered Evan a firm and powerful grip, he smiled and said, “All people treasure the nobility of work. If everyone had a job, there would be no war.”

“Then
I’d
be out of a job,” Evan said, surprising himself.

Krekar took the comment in stride, his smile never wavering. “But not for long, I’d wager. Even my friend Mr. Nolan here, a professional soldier of some renown, has found meaningful work in the private sector. In any event, welcome to my country, Lieutenant. You’re in good hands with Mr. Nolan.”

“I’m getting that impression,” Evan said.

Krekar brought his smile back to Nolan. “One hears rumors that Mr. Allstrong is going to be bidding on the currency project.”

This was the contract to replace Iraq’s old currency, thirteen thousand tons of paper that featured the face of Saddam Hussein on every bill, with one of a new design. Twenty-four hundred tons of new dinars would have to be distributed in under three months. This would involve hundreds of Iraqis in all parts of the country, all of whom would need to be housed and fed in new camps with new infrastructure and Internet services at Mosul, Basra, and many other sites—exactly the kind of work Allstrong was doing now at Baghdad Airport. It would also involve supplying a fleet of five-ton trucks to carry the people and the money.

“It’s entirely possible,” Nolan said. “Although I haven’t talked to Jack in a couple of weeks. And you know, here a couple of weeks the world can change.”

“Well, when you do see him,” Krekar said, “please mention my name to him. The paper and pressing plants as well as the design elements and the banking issues—I know some people with these skills and perhaps Jack and I could reach an arrangement, if Allah is willing.”

“I’ll be sure to let him know, Kuvan. If he’s bidding at all, that is.”

Behind them, Tucker cleared his throat. Krekar bowed a hasty good-bye to Nolan and Evan and then stepped up to the desk.

Backing up a couple of feet, bringing Evan with him, Nolan spoke sotto voce, “Talk about getting it done. If Kuvan’s with us on this currency thing, we’re going to lock it up. Taking nothing away from Jack’s accomplishment, without Kuvan we don’t have the airport, and that’s no exaggeration.”

“What’d he do?”

“Well, you know I told you it was all about getting a lot of feet on the ground here in a couple of weeks. Jack promised he could do it, and the CPA believed him—he’s a persuasive guy. But still, push came to shove and Custer Battles was beating us getting guys to work for them at every turn. Jack had no idea where he was going to find guards and cooks and all the other bodies he was going to need. So, it turns out that one of Jack’s old Delta buddies does security for KBR, and he turns him on to Kuvan, who’s connected to this endless string of mules—Nepalese, Jordanians, Turks, Filipinos, you name it. You give these guys a buck an hour, they’ll do anything for you—cook, clean, kill somebody…”

“A buck an hour? Is that what they’re making?”

“Give or take, for the cooks and staff. Guards maybe two hundred a month.” Nolan lowered his voice even further, gestured toward the desk. “But don’t let Tucker hear that. Jack bid it out at around twenty an hour per man, but as I say, Kuvan’s a genius. His fee is two bucks an hour, which takes our cost up to three an hour, so we’re hauling in seventeen. That’s per hour, twenty-four seven, times a hundred and sixty guys so far, with another two hundred in the pipeline. And the more we bring on, the more we make. Like I told you, you play it right, this place is a gold mine. How much they paying you, Evan, two grand a month?”

“Close. Plus hazard duty…”

Nolan cut him off with a laugh. “Hazard duty, what’s that, a hundred fifty a month? That’s what our cooks make.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that.” The news disturbed Evan—a hundred and fifty dollars extra per month and he faced death every day.

After a little pause, Nolan looked at him sideways. “You know what I’m making?”

“No idea.”

“You want to know?”

A nod. “Sure.”

“Twenty thousand a month. That’s tax-free, by the way. Of course, I’ve got lots of experience and there’s a premium on guys like me. But still, guys like you can finish up here, then turn around and come back a month later with any of us contractors, and you’re looking at ten grand minimum a month. A six-month tour and you’re back home, loaded. This thing lasts long enough, the smart-money bet by the way, and I go home a millionaire.”

U
P AT THE DESK,
Major Charles Tucker looked like he could use some time in the sun. He’d sweated through his shirt. He sported rimless glasses, had a high forehead, and nearly invisible blond eyebrows—a caricature of the harried accountant. And he made no secret of his disdain for Nolan. “Let’s see your paperwork. Who signed off on it this time?”

“Colonel Ramsdale, sir. Air-base Security Services Coordinator.”

“Another one of Mr. Allstrong’s friends?”

“A comrade-in-arms. Yes, sir. They were in Desert Storm together.”

“I’m happy for them.” Tucker looked down at the sheets of paper Nolan had handed him. He flipped the first page, studied the second, went back to the first.

“Everything in order, sir?” Nolan asked with an ironic obsequiousness.

“This is a lot of money to take away in cash, Nolan.” He gestured to Evan. “Who’s this guy?”

“Convoy support, sir. Protection back to the base.”

Tucker went back to the papers. “Okay, I can see the payroll, but what’s this sixty-thousand-dollar add-on for”—he squinted down at the paper—“does this say dogs?”

“Yes, sir. Bomb-sniffing dogs, which we need to feed and build kennels for, along with their trainers and handlers.”

“And Ramsdale approved this?”

“Apparently so, sir.” Nolan leaned down and pretended to be looking for Ramsdale’s signature. Evan stifled a smile. Nolan, punctiliously polite, somehow managed to put a bit of the needle into every exchange.

“I’m going to have somebody in audit verify this.”

Nolan shrugged. “Of course, sir.”

“Sixty thousand dollars for a bunch of dogs!”

“Bomb-sniffing dogs, sir.” Nolan remained mild. “And the infrastructure associated with them.”

But apparently there was nothing Tucker could do about it. Nolan had his form in order and it was signed by one of the Army’s sanctioned pay-masters. He scribbled something on the bottom of the form. Then he looked up. Behind Nolan, the line had grown again to four or five other customers. “Specie?” Tucker said.

“I beg your pardon,” Nolan replied.

“Don’t fuck with me, Nolan. Dollars or dinars?”

“I think dollars.”

“Yes. I thought you would think that. You’re paying your people in dollars?”

“That’s all they’ll take, sir. The old dinar’s a little shaky right now.”

Tucker made another note, tore off his duplicate copy, and put it in his top right-hand drawer. “This is going to audit,” he repeated, then looked around Nolan and said, “Next!”

T
HAT NIGHT IN HIS TRAILER’S OFFICE,
Jack Allstrong sipped scotch with Ron Nolan while they tossed a plastic-wrapped bundle of five hundred hundred-dollar bills—fifty thousand dollars—back and forth, playing catch. Allstrong’s office, nice at it was, remained a sore point with him. This was because the main office of his chief competitor, Custer Battles (“CB”), was in one of the newly reburbished terminals. When Mike Battles had first gotten here two months before, he found that he’d inherited several empty shells of airport terminal buildings, littered with glass, concrete, rebar, garbage, and human waste. He had cleaned the place up, carpeted the floors, wallpapered (all of his supplies bought and shipped from the United States), put showers in the bathrooms, and hooked the place up to a wireless Internet connection.

At about the same time, Jack Allstrong had had to start work on his trailer park to house his guards and cooks, although he still couldn’t compete with such CB amenities as a swimming pool and a rec room with a pool table. Allstrong knew that these types of cosmetics would be important to help convince his clients that he was serious and committed to the long-term success of the mission, but he was initially hampered by lack of infrastructure and simple good help.

But then that genius Kuvan Krekar had come up with the idea of dog kennels as another income source, and that was already working. Allstrong now had a decent number of the ministry people starting to believe that IED-and bomb-sniffing dogs would be an essential part of the rebuilding process in bases all over the country.

So all in all, Jack was in high spirits for a variety of reasons: Kuvan was in fact interested in going in with them on their currency-exchange bid, which gave it immediate credibility and might make them the front runners over CB; the CPA was still paying them in dollars (which meant Allstrong could buy his own dinars to pay his local workers at the deeply discounted black-market exchange rate); the bomb-sniffing-dog revenue wasn’t going to be stopped, at least in the short term, by bureaucrats like Charlie Tucker.

The bottom line was that the two million dollars in cash that Nolan had retrieved today and carried here in his backpack covered approximately four hundred thousand dollars in the company’s actual current expenses, including tips to Colonel Ramsdale and several other middlemen. Everyone was too busy and/or too afraid and the times were too chaotic for anyone to bother keeping close tabs on exactly what the money was used for, or exactly where it went. There was plenty of it, in cash, and the mandate was to get Iraq up and running again. Subtext: whatever it cost.

For example, in the first month of the contract, Allstrong’s trailer park had run out of drinking water within a week, a true crisis. Jack had gone to Ramsdale and told him he desperately needed to buy more water immediately, but that he was out of money, what with payroll, housing costs, legitimate security equipment, weapons, and vehicles such as armored Mercedes-Benz sedans, and all other daily supplies for his now close to 150-man staff. Without a personal look at the situation and apparently without a qualm, Ramsdale signed off on an authorization for Allstrong to add six hundred thousand dollars to the original sixteen-million-dollar contract over its six-month life—peanuts considering the fact that the contract as written already was paying Allstrong a little bit more than eighty-eight thousand dollars a day, all of it in cash.

Allstrong had requested a total of a hundred thousand dollars from Ramsdale for the water, but the colonel had been so used to thinking in one-month units that he’d okayed six times the requested price, and Allstrong had seen no reason to correct him. And after all, the truth was that they were all working in an extremely hostile environment, where the danger of death was real and omnipresent. In Allstrong’s view, that risk should not go without significant reward, even if much of it turned out to be under the table. It wasn’t as though people like Ramsdale didn’t know what was happening. In fact, Ramsdale was planning to retire from the active military before the year was out, and he’d already made a commitment to stay on in Iraq as one of Allstrong’s senior security analysts at a salary of $240,000 per year.

Standing over by his wall map, Allstrong caught the latest toss of the packet of bills from Nolan and turned it over in his hands. “So.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t an answer. The tone seemed to say,
I’m holding on to fifty thousand dollars in cash, when last year I was flat broke
. He smiled. “How sweet is this, huh, Ron?”

“Yes, sir.” Nolan tipped up his scotch. “It’s turning out to be a good year.”

“Yes, it is.” Allstrong crossed over to his desk, casually flipping the wrapped bills package over to Nolan. “And I think it could be even better, but I’m leery of burning out my best assets, which are men like you. No, no, no, don’t give me any of that false modesty bullshit. I send you out to do a job and you get the job done. It’s not every guy in the world can walk around with two million dollars and not be tempted to disappear with it.”

This was more than just idle chatter. That exact temptation, though for far less money—a quarter of a million dollars—had proven too strong for at least one of Allstrong’s other senior employees in the past two months. Beyond that, almost two dozen of his first crew of guard hires—from pre-Kuvan sources—had disappeared with guns and credentials almost as soon as they’d been issued them.

But Ron Nolan merely shrugged. “You pay me well, Jack. I like the work. It’s nice to get a regular paycheck. Beyond which”—he broke his own smile—“I disappear with two million of your money, I’m pretty sure you’d hunt me down and kill me.”

Allstrong pointed a finger at him. “You’re not all wrong there. Nothing personal.”

“No, of course not.”

Allstrong put a haunch on the corner of his desk. “What I’m getting at is whether you’re starting to feel stretched a little thin.”

“No, I’m good.”

“I ask because another opportunity has come up—I know, they’re growing on trees nowadays, but if I don’t pick ’em somebody else will. Anyway, I wanted to run it by you, see if you wanted to take point on it. I should tell you, I consider it pretty high risk, even for here.”

“Taking a walk over here is high risk, Jack.”

“Yes, it is. But this is in the Sunni Triangle.”

Nolan tossed the package up and caught it. He shrugged. “What’s the gig?”

“Pacific Safety—Rick Slocum’s outfit, he’s tight with Rumsfeld—just pulled in a contract through the Corps of Engineers to rewire the whole goddamn Triangle in three months. High-voltage wiring and all the towers to hold it. You ready for this? He’s going to need seven hundred guards for his people.”

Nolan whistled. “Seven hundred?”

“I know. A shitload. But I’m sure Kuvan can get ’em.”

“I’m sure he can too. You gotta love them Kurds.”

“Who doesn’t? So…you want to hear the numbers?”

“Sure,” Nolan said. “I haven’t had a good hard-on in a couple of days.” With the wrapped bills in one hand and his tumbler of scotch in the other, he got up and crossed over to Allstrong’s desk.

His boss pulled over the adding machine and started punching and talking. “Let’s assume two hundred a month for the guards, what we’re paying now. Good? We’ve got seven hundred guys working for ninety days, that’s four hundred twenty thousand. Plus food and ammo and other incidentals. Let’s go wild and call that twenty bucks a man per day, so forty-two grand. Shooting high, call our whole expense five hundred grand. Slocum told me off the record that because of the high risk in the area, he expects the winning bid to come in at no less than twelve mil. Which is exactly what I’m going to bid it at and which, if you’re doing your math”—he hit the calculator—“is a three-month profit of eleven million five hundred thousand dollars.”

“I’ve definitely got wood,” Nolan said.

“So you’re in if we get it?”

“All the way, Jack. We’d be crazy not to.”

“I agree. But I’m not sugarcoating it. I’m thinking we might lose a dozen guys. I’m talking dead, not deserted or disappeared.”

“Okay.”

“There’d be a significant bonus in it for you. Twenty a month sound good?”

“When do I start?”

“First, let’s get the gig. But remember, I want you to be sure you’re good with it. You’ll have your bare ass hanging out there.”

“And seven hundred guys guarding it, Jack. Can I bring my escorts? I like that guy Scholler. He runs a tight ship.”

“I’ll talk to Calliston, but I can’t imagine there’d be any problem. He doesn’t even know who those guys are.”

“Poor bastards.”

“Hey,” Allstrong said, “they enlisted. What’d they expect?” He went around his desk and stood looking out the window at the airport outside. An enormous C-17 Globemaster III transport plane coasted by on the tarmac—several hundred more tons of supplies and equipment direct from the United States. Without turning around, he said, “So between now and then, what’s your schedule look like?”

“When exactly?”

“Next couple of weeks.”

“Pretty free. I got the message out up at Anaconda and Tikrit. We’ve definitely got friends trying to hook us up in both places, but they’ve got to clear their own brass first. We might have to sub under KBR, but I got the sense they’re generally open to us doing what we’ve done here. Whatever happens, it’s going to take a little time. Why?”

Now Allstrong did turn. “I’d like to send you back to the States for a week or two. Clean up some problems in the home office. I’d go myself, but I don’t feel like I can leave here just now if we want to pick up these jobs we’re talking about. You’d be back in plenty of time for the Triangle thing if that comes about. And after today, payroll’s covered until next time.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Well.” Allstrong tipped up the last of his scotch. “I hired a private eye and he’s found Arnold Zwick. The idiot went back home to Frisco.” Zwick was the company’s senior executive who’d disappeared with a quarter million dollars of Allstrong’s money about six weeks before. “I’d kind of like to get my money back. I was hoping you could talk some sense into him. After that, take a little well-deserved R and R wherever you want to go. Sound good?”

“When do you want me to leave?”

“I can get you on a plane to Travis tomorrow morning.”

“Done.”

Allstrong broke a smile. “You know, Ron, I hate it when you take so long to make your decisions.”

“I know,” Nolan said. “It’s a flaw. I’m working on it.”

At his desk, Allstrong picked up a manila envelope and handed it across to Nolan. “If what’s in that doesn’t answer all your questions, I’ll brief you further in the morning. Now you’d better go do some packing.”

“I’m gone.”

Nolan executed a brisk salute and whirled around. His hand was on the doorknob when Allstrong spoke behind him.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Nolan straightened up and turned around as he pulled the packet of bills out from under his jacket. He was smiling. “Oh, you mean this old thing?” He tossed it back to his boss. “Just seeing if you’re paying attention, Jack, keeping you on your toes.”

“Pretty much always,” Allstrong said.

“I can see that. Catch you in the morning.”