The Return Of Dog Team

by William W. Johnstone

  Kilroy dismissed the subject from his mind and moved on to the next errand, one that was directly related to and helped confirm his cover identity as a mail-and-parcel delivery troubleshooter for Mercury Transport. He went to the base post office/ message center, which was housed in a Quonset-shaped tent. Sgt. Teed was on duty, baggy-eyed and bassett-hound-faced. He knew Kilroy from past dealings related to the mails. The beautiful part of the cover story was that so many noncombat jobs had been farmed out to private civilian contractors, it made perfect sense for someone like Kilroy to be untangling the knotted mail-delivery system.

  Teed noted that recent deliveries had been spotty. He spoke, not confrontationally, but with the air of a man stating a fact.

  Kilroy said, “It’s backed up at the distribution center farther west. Azif’s become a real bottleneck, so we’re sending our shipments along alternate routes. In a few days the slowdown should be cleared up, and the mail back to its normal schedule.”

  “Good,” the noncom said. “Troops sure count on that mail from back home. Especially out here, isolated from everything else. Not everybody uses e-mail. There’s no substitute for that handwritten note from someone back home. When the mail is stalled or stopped, morale sure takes a nosedive.”

  Kilroy went to work. His clipboard carried a sheaf of papers: manifests, parcel post numbers, receipted package tags, mail sorting serial numbers. He and Teed went down various lists item by item, comparing notes, checking and double-checking. Kilroy had to perform all the duties of a mail-delivery expediter to maintain a credible cover. He took out a pocket notepad and began making some entries.

  The noncom said, “No fancy Palm computers for you?”

  “They don’t last long out here. Sand gets into them,” Kilroy said.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Besides, I never had a notepad crash on me.”

  Kilroy generated his quota of paperwork and made ready to move on. He said, “Where’s the mail truck that got shot up?”

  Teed shrugged. “Motor pool, I guess.”

  Kilroy finalized his paperwork and exited. The sun was lower in the sky so that the upper half of the orange-red globe showed above a horizontal band of slate gray clouds.

  The base was busy, humming. Helicopters landed and took off from the landing pad. Lines of Humvee patrol vehicles returned to base while other patrols departed. Chow time was near, and food smells wafted out of the mess hall.

  Kilroy’s stomach rumbled, reminding him that he was a long time between meals. Ignoring his hunger, he crossed to the motor pool, which was made up of a separate compound in and to one side of the base. It was bordered by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with rolls of concertina barbed wire. The main gates opened on the bare earth of a gravel-strewn, oil-stained yard. Grouped around it were vehicles of all types: trucks, forklifts, Humvees, even some civilian cars and SUVs.

  A prefab steel building served as a multibayed garage. In front of it stood several sets of fuel pumps for gas and diesel fuel. Groups of fatigue-clad troops were clustered around different spots in the yard, carrying out various automotive-related tasks and chores.

  The tan SUV stood in one of the garage bays. The hood was open, and Vang Bulo stood with tools in hand, leaning over the engine. In another bay, at the opposite end of the shop, a couple of Special Forces guys and some mechanics were installing some customized armor plating, gun ports, and mountings on a Humvee.

  Vang Bulo’s back was to Kilroy, and so he was unaware of his approach. He had his head deep in engine innards. Kilroy was going to hail him but thought better of it; the big Ugandan looked busy, and Kilroy didn’t want to disrupt his concentration.

  Besides, he had other business to transact. Mercury Transport business. Officially, Vang Bulo was carried on the Mercury employee rolls as an assistant. In reality, it meant that he was exempt from having to fill out all but the most minimal paperwork relating to the cover job.

  Kilroy went around to a side shed adjacent to the garage. It was a small hut, barely able to fit a table and the man who sat behind it in a chair. A couple of filing cabinets lined the walls, further shrinking the space.

  Kilroy stayed in the open doorway facing Sgt. Cowdery, the man in charge of the motor pool. Cowdery was jowly, with a paunch. His clean-shaven face was flushed red under a sheen of sweat. A lock of oily black hair emerged from below his cap, falling on his forehead. Sweat pasted it in place. Pale eyes, almost colorless, contrasted with his florid red complexion.

  He was sitting in a chair with his face shoved close to the grille of a portable desk fan. It was a revolving fan, so he kept shifting around in his chair, trying to keep his face aligned with the airstream.

  When he couldn’t ignore Kilroy any longer, he sank bank in his chair, the springs groaning under him. Kilroy flashed his photo ID at the other, holding it in front of Cowdery’s face so he could see it. He didn’t want Cowdery putting his sweaty fingers on it. Cowdery flicked his eyes at it, giving it barely a glance. He nodded, signaling Kilroy to continue.

  Kilroy identified himself as the Mercury man and said, “A mail truck was shot up the other day. I’m here to make arrangements for its disposition.”

  “It’s disposed of,” Cowdery said.

  “You got rid of it?”

  “Nope. It’s out back. What I mean, it’s a total wreck. Lucky the driver was able to get it this far. Lucky for him, that is. You don’t want to be stuck out alone on the highway with a dead machine. It was shot up pretty bad and leaking coolant and oil like crazy, but somehow it limped in to base. The engine’s all fused up now. A mass of metal.”

  Kilroy said, “Guess I’ll have it towed or hauled out on a flatbed.”

  Cowdery started to shrug his shoulders but gave up the attempt for lack of energy or interest. “Why bother?”

  Kilroy smiled thinly. “Mercury Transport’s just like the Army. They’ve got a system, and that’s how things are done. If the rules say that the vehicle was to be brought back to its issuing depot in Baghdad, then that’s how it has to be done. Red tape, you know.”

  “I know,” Cowdery said, nodding so vigorously that the drop of sweat fell off the tip of his nose. “If I spent half as much time working on engines as I do filling out forms, well, there’d be plenty more mechanized stock rolling, believe you me.”

  “Where’s the truck?”

  “In back of the garage,” Cowdery said, jerking a thumb in its direction.

  “I can find it,” Kilroy said quickly. “Don’t bother to get up.”

  Cowdery had made no indication of rising from his chair, but Kilroy had tossed that in as a little zinger. If Cowdery took offense, he gave no notice of it. He gripped the table edge with both hands and leaned forward, shoving his face toward the desk fan, looking like a dog sticking its head out of a car window to catch the breeze.

  Kilroy circled around to the rear of the garage. A number of wrecks were heaped back there. One of them was the mail truck. Actually, it was more of a panel van than truck. It was shot up pretty bad. If it hadn’t been armored, it wouldn’t have made it. Neither would the driver. He’d been wounded, but not critically, and had already been airlifted back to a hospital in the Green Zone.

  Cowdery was right: the van was a total loss. It was good for little more than scrap and would cost more to haul it away than to leave it here. But that was procedure. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that Mercury Transport had a bureaucratic system. And it wasn’t his place to interfere with that system where it didn’t directly affect his real job, the one for which his role as cargo expediter was just cover. His job as Dog Team assassin.

  He went back to the shed and told Cowdery that he’d arrange for the wreck to be hauled away. The noncom didn’t much care. His mission was to keep vehicles running, not look after those that were already defunct. Especially ones that weren’t Army.

  Kilroy crossed the yard to the garage where Vang Bulo was working on the SUV. He said, “She going to li
ve?”

  “Affirmative,” Vang Bulo said. “The armor plating was barely dented. It held up. It can take plenty more. I had her up on the rack just in case, to check to make sure there was no damage from stray slugs.”

  “And—?”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “So she’s ready for action.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good. Tonight we’ll make a special delivery,” Kilroy said.

  Vang Bulo said, “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Let’s head over to the mess hall and get some chow.”

  “You go on ahead. I’ve still got some tweaking I want to do on the engine.”

  Kilroy exited the garage. The Special Forces guys had finished what they were doing on the Humvee and had gone outside. Somewhere, somebody had found a wooden door and painted a human-sized outline on one side of it. It was propped up against a couple of fifty-gallon drums, and the Special Forces guys were throwing knives at it.

  Kilroy paused to take a look. There were three of them. Throwing knives accurately is a difficult skill to master. Kilroy had tried his hand at it more than once, but the skill had eluded him.

  It was the same for two of the Special Forces guys. They had trouble getting the knives to stick in the wood, never mind about actually hitting the target. The knives stuck in about half the time they threw. The other half, the blades bounced off, clattering.

  The third was a wizard with the blade, though. He was a big guy, in his early twenties, built like a pro football linebacker. Big, but he could move. His name tag read: IRELAND.

  You could tell by his form that he had the art down cold. Each time he threw, the blade landed square in a vital spot of the outlined human target: between the eyes, in the heart, or in the belly.

  While Kilroy was watching, Ireland flung a blade that landed dead square in the middle of the figure’s throat. The thin, black blade struck with a twang and hung there quivering.

  Kilroy said, “Bravo.”

  The Special Forces trio turned to look at him. Their expressions weren’t unfriendly, but they weren’t exactly warm, either. They were guarded, waiting to see what would come next. The stranger wore civilian clothes, and civilians were always an unknown quantity. Was he just being friendly, or was he some kind of asshole with an agenda or something to prove?

  Kilroy indicated the dagger in the target. “You have talent.”

  “Thanks,” Ireland said. “Want to try your hand?”

  “Not me,” Kilroy demurred. “The only knife I’m handy with is a knife and fork, and I’m going to try my hand with them in the mess hall. But I appreciate talent when I see it.”

  He nodded pleasantly and moved on, crossing the yard to the main gates.

  The Special Forces trio watched him go. They were all noncoms. Sgt. Webb Tillotson was the senior man. He was forty, sandy haired, clean shaven, neat, compactly muscled. A communications expert.

  Sgt. Hector Garza was in his mid-thirties, a bull of a man with fierce black brows and mustache, a weapons specialist.

  Sgt. Steve Ireland’s Green Beret was more newly minted. He was six feet two, broad shouldered, athletic. He’d played college ball and been named an All-American. When he was a boy back on his family’s ranch in Arizona, a hand named Latigo had taught him how to throw a knife. He’d spent hundreds of hours practicing, throwing knives into targets chalked on the side of an outbuilding. But that was long ago and far away. Or at least it felt that way to him. Here in Iraq, all else in the outside world seemed long ago and far away.

  The three were members of the same team: Operational Detachments Alpha 586. ODA 586, as such Special Forces units are called.

  The team had recently been brought in to the base to carry out a near-future mission in the border area. A mission whose nature was as yet unknown to them. But they knew it would be something hairy. That was why they’d been called in.

  Webb Tillotson’s narrowed eyes followed Kilroy’s dwindling form. “I’ve seen him before.”

  Garza said, “That’s Kilroy.”

  Tillotson looked at him, surprised. “You know him?”

  “Not personally, but he’s around. He’s like a postal inspector or something.”

  “Or something.” Tillotson laughed, but his eyes were thoughtful as they looked in the direction Kilroy had gone.

  Garza said, “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve seen him before,” Tillotson said again. “Under unforgettable circumstances. And they didn’t include working for the post office.”

  Steve Ireland, interested, said, “How so?”

  Tillotson said, “About ten years ago, I was serving in the Balkans, on a peacekeeping mission around Srebenica. It was a real shithole. Ethnic cleansing, massacres, mass rapes, you name it. Warlords, crime bosses, and what seemed like every cutthroat in the region were all fighting and double-crossing each other. With the usual innocent civilians caught in the middle and getting whipsawed by all sides.

  “One day, Kilroy arrives from out of nowhere on the scene. Only his name wasn’t Kilroy then. I forget what it was, but it’s not important, since it was fake. Kilroy’s probably not his name, either. He was in civvies then, like now, but you could smell military coming off from him from a mile away.

  “He ran around with a couple of local wild men. Real maniacs, outlaw types, looking like Balkan mountain men who hadn’t been down out of the hills in years, and maybe they hadn’t. Stone killers. The word came down from the top—and I do mean the top—that Kilroy was to be allowed to come and go as he pleased. Which was a good way to get dead in that place at that time.”

  Garza, doubtful, said, “If it was the same guy.”

  “It’s him. He’s not the type you forget. Anyway, right around that time, Vukan Maledar, the Serb death squad leader, got knocked off. Assassinated, shot with a high-powered rifle. It was a hell of a shot—caught him going into church on the occasion of his first-born son’s christening. The town—hell, the whole region—was in an uproar, but the shooter escaped. That night, Kilroy, or whatever the hell he was calling himself, was driven to an airfield and flown out at night. The plane was in place for that one purpose, to take him away.”

  Steve Ireland said, “Your point being that Kilroy was the shooter?”

  “Maledar was giving everybody a hard time, not least of all including our troops. He was a real roadblock to progress,” Tillotson said. “Kilroy cleared that road. He’s a shooter, a big-game hunter.”

  Garza was unconvinced. “You know this? Or is it just some war story you heard?”

  “A buddy of mine was in the car that took Kilroy to the airfield,” Tillotson said, “and that’s a fact.”

  There was a silence.

  “Interesting,” Steve Ireland said at last. “What’s he doing here? Think he’s connected to our mission?”

  Tillotson said, “I could answer that better if I knew what our mission is.”

  Garza said, “Don’t be in such a hurry. We’ll find out soon enough, and when we do, it’s sure to be a ballbreaker.”

  “One thing’s for sure,” Tillotson said. “With Kilroy here, something’s cooking. Something big.”

  “I still think he’s with the postal service,” Garza said.

  Tillotson said, “Dead letter office, maybe.”

  Three

  On the night after the supply truck was blown up in Azif, Fadleel the smuggler and chieftain and about ten or so of his kinsmen were moving a load of contraband weapons across the border from Iran into Iraq. The transfer point was a wadi, a dry watercourse, in the rugged hills east of the Azif highway terminus.

  Fadleel was heavyset, with graying hair and a beard. He was heavily armed, with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a pair of 9-mm pistols worn low on his hips, gunslinger style. They had to be worn low. His big belly ensured that. Even so, his stomach slopped over the top of the gunbelts.

  He was part of a clan of Iranian border hoppers that had been specializing in smuggling f
or generations. Their business was moving contraband back and forth across the border: gold, drugs, women, whatever was in demand. These days it was weapons.

  His men were all related to him, being nephews or cousins at one or two removes. They were bound to him by the sacred ties of blood and family obligation. That’s how business was done throughout the region.

  Fadleel and company were holding a midnight rendezvous with their Iraqi counterparts, members of Hassani Akkad’s criminal gang.

  The wadi’s winding path through the hills connected both sides of the border. It was one of many such routes that honeycombed the district, making it a smuggler’s paradise.

  The meeting place was a wide spot in the wadi. It was a lonely site, a sand- and dirt-floored gully snaking through a maze of rocky ridges. An overcast sky screened out the stars and moon.

  Two pickup trucks stood side by side on the wadi floor, their beds filled with crates of weapons. A handful of men, gunrunners, stood around the trucks, smoking cigarettes, talking in low voices, waiting for the transaction to be concluded. Fadleel’s men, all well armed. Vigilant.

  What looked like a wasteland wasn’t. There was usually plenty of human presence here, for those who knew where to look for it. Farmhouses were planted deep among the rocky ridges. The district was a corridor for nomadic Bedouin tribes that grazed their flocks of sheep and goats on both sides of the border. There wasn’t much pasturage, but there was enough to sustain them. When a grazing area was played out, the tribes moved on to the next one. One often saw their campfires, heard the barking of their dogs.

  But not tonight. The border zone had gotten hot in the last two weeks. There had been shootings and ambushes. A phantom third force had moved in. Several gun shipments had been hijacked, the gunrunners slain, and their contraband stolen. Both sellers and buyers had been hit.

  Who was responsible? The Bedouins knew better than to target the brigands. Attacking the long-established smuggling trade brought swift and sure retribution. The nomads might nevertheless be tempted by a target of opportunity once in a while, but this latest assault was a sustained effort.