Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“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.