Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

For about two beats, he considered trying to sneak the classified package back to the pile of crap on Elmore Snow’s desk. Then he thought again.

It was bad enough just getting his hands on a shred of any kind of information that might get Cesare Alosi off his ass. But this was way too much, and putting the envelope back now, way too risky.

He pounded the steering wheel with both fists. The magnitude of what he had stolen went far askew of the boundaries of even his corrupt sense of right and wrong. Way over the top of anything Cooder-with-a-D anticipated he might swipe for his boss.

“Why the fuck would anyone with half a brain leave something this deadly just lying in a pile of mail?” he said, looking at the red TOP SECRET stamp on the op plan’s cover page. Then he rationalized, “Assholes fucking deserve to have it stolen.”

Blevins thought about burning it, or tossing it in the trash somewhere back on post. “That’d serve ’em right.” But he had to have something to hand to Alosi, or it was literally his ass.

“Fuck this,” Ray-Dean finally resolved, as he did so many other perplexing matters, and tossed the envelope on the passenger seat. “What’s done is done. Let the chips fall,” he said as he tromped on the gas on the company Escalade, heading back to his hotel in the relative safety of the Baghdad Green Zone.

Ray-Dean went straight to his room, tossed the envelope on his bed, then did an about-face and shot the gap down to the hotel lounge, a poor attempt at a luxury cocktail bar serving an ever-changing variety of smuggled liquor and homemade Iraqi moonshine.

Most of the “good stuff” came from a British paratrooper major turned private-security operator named James, who came from Leeds in England. With an Iraqi named Ajax, a procurer of anything one might want, legal or otherwise, he had opened a well-hidden but very popular joint called the Baghdad Country Club.

James and an enterprising blue-eyed Kurdish businessman named Ahmed, who owned nearly all of Iraq’s duty-free rights, had partnered in late 2005 and began trucking in booze from the north. A very dangerous business in a mostly Muslim country with restrictive alcohol-prohibition laws and radical booze-hating zealots at every turn.

No less than twice a week on differing days and never the same times, and sometimes more often, depending on demand, the hotel hospitality manager had a laundry truck stop at the Baghdad Country Club and restock the bar with whatever James from Leeds had available. Loading the hotel laundry truck always involved a game of cat and mouse to avoid detection, especially by the club’s nosy neighbors, moving the boxes wrapped in bundles of bed linen and towels. Ironically, the Baghdad Country Club sat behind a wall in a garden behind a second, foliage-covered outside wall, next door to the powerful Iranian-controlled, Shiite-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But then, Baghdad has always lived as a city filled with contradictions.

Hacksaw, Habu, Kermit The Frog, and many of the other Malone-Leyva operators frequented the Baghdad Country Club, a watering hole that James and Ajax had patterned after the infamous Rick’s Café of Casablanca , but most nights, the place seemed more like Chalmun’s Cantina in the pirate city Mos Eisley from Star Wars .

Cooder-with-a-D was not nearly the social animal and war-story teller that the pirate trio Walter Gillespie, Kermit Alexander, or even Cory Webster were. Baghdad Country Club, with its mix of contractors and reporters, mercenaries and gunrunners, hookers and hoods, had a little too much social mix for Ray-Dean’s taste. He mostly drank alone.

When Blevins stepped through the beaded curtain that hid the goings-on inside the dark hotel lounge, he locked eyes on Francoise, the loud-smelling French reporter with the inviting snatch. She sat in a booth, basking in the red glow of a candle in a net-wrapped ruby-glass snifter, nursing a tall brown drink with half-melted ice and a cherry floating on top. In her fingers she held a long, thin pink cigarette with a gold ring above a black filter tip that she lipped deep in her ample mouth, sucking her lungs full of designer-flavored smoke.

“Got another one of those?” Ray-Dean said as he took a seat across from her and tossed his sweat-ringed Malone-Leyva operator’s ball cap on the table.

“Sure,” she said, and passed him the gold-trimmed pink-and-black flat cardboard box.

Blevins took one out and lit it with the candle. As he exhaled, he smiled. “Whatcha drinking?”

“Supposed to be Long Island Iced Tea,” Francoise breathed back, her husky voice saying fuck me between the lines. “Only God knows what they used as liquor.”

“Long as it gets the job done, who cares? In this place? Be thankful you’ve got ice,” Ray-Dean said, snapping his fingers at the bartender, pointing at Francoise’s drink, then pointing at himself. The barkeep nodded and took a glass off the counter and began mixing Blevins a Baghdad version of the wicked cocktail.

“So…” Francoise said, cigarette smoke curling out of her mouth, then swirling up her nostrils. She leaned toward Ray-Dean so he could see down her blouse, pressed her breasts’ cleavage together, and smiled at him with her eyes sagging half-shut. “What’s news?”

Cooder-with-a-D leaned toward Francoise and let his eyes go half-shut as he smiled back at her. “Want to go to your room to fuck?”

Then he smiled more. “Or… We can go to mine.”

“Got anything to drink up there?” she asked.

“Old Fuad keeps a stash of Stolichnaya vodka that he sells me, straight out of Moscow by way of Istanbul,” Ray-Dean said. “I’ll pick up a bottle to keep us warm.”

“I like Beluga.” Francoise shrugged. “Have you had it? It’s new from Russia. Everyone in Paris is drinking it.”

“This ain’t Paris,” Blevins said, as the bartender brought him his Long Island Iced Tea. “Like I said, you’re lucky to get ice. And Stoli sure as shit ain’t rotgut.”

“I’m waiting for a friend,” the French reporter said. “You know Paolo? The sound tech for CNN, he’s from Milan.”

Ray-Dean took a sip off the top of his tea. “Naw.” And he gave her a second look. “You’d rather fuck him than me?”

She shook her head and added a horny smile. “I thought he might join us. A ménage à trois . You like?”

Cooder laughed. “Fucking nasty bitch.”

She smiled more. “He’s bisexual, you know.”

“Oh, fuck no!” Blevins let out so loud it made the barkeep turn and look. “I’ll go for you and another bitch, but no dudes. I make it a rule. I don’t cross swords.”

“You’ve never tried it?” Francoise asked.

“No, and never will,” Ray-Dean came back.

“It is so hot to see a man with a man, and then me with them both,” she breathed hot, licking her lips.

“You want to fuck? I’ll fuck you ’til your eyes pop. I’m all the man you need,” Cooder bragged.

Francoise shrugged and smiled more. When she had Ray-Dean’s full attention, she tapped her finger on her nose.

“Yeah,” Cooder said, “I know what you want. I got a bag of blow so good it’ll make you wet your pants. Couple hits, you’ll want to fuck a lamp pole.”

Francoise licked her lips. “Does talking so vulgar make you excited? It does me!”

Ray-Dean grinned. “Yeah, baby. I’m so hard right now, my dick can cut diamonds.”

“Bon.” She smiled.

Captain Mike Burkehart rolled hard and fast behind the assessment team’s command Humvee, driving Colonel Snow’s MARSOC Hummer that Corporal Butler normally piloted. The skipper had grabbed an unsuspecting Marine private first class nicknamed Eugene the Jeep, who was cleaning a coffeepot in the operations office at the time, and told the lad to ride shotgun with him. Another operations Hummer with a machine gun topside rode tail-end-Charlie behind them.