Caravan of Thieves

by David Rich

  “Twenty-five million won’t go very far.”

  “You’re right.” His chest was heaving with pride now and his blue eyes were twinkling. I was afraid he was going to burst into song. “We have five more stashes just like it around the country. And we have other resources. And immediately upon taking over we will be repaid out of oil revenues. We’ve been planning this for years.”

  “How will you transport the oil?”

  “Pipeline. There’s one through Turkey—”

  “They won’t like a Kurdish country on their border.”

  “—and one through Syria.”

  I was elated by the insanity of it all. And the stupidity. The marvels Dan would have worked with this setup danced across the screens. They had missed their big chance when they killed him. In the field of divide and conquer, misappropriation of precious resources, and criminal land grabs, Dan was a rare and special natural resource, worth much more than twenty-five million to them. And I doubt he would have needed that much to have gained the entire region and left the rest of the country thanking him, at least for a little while. The Republic of Danistan. Too bad.

  I reached into my back pocket and retrieved a scrap of paper and handed it to McColl. He read the numbers on it. “Coordinates?”

  “Yes.”

  McColl read the note to himself, then read it again out loud: “You thought you could skip out on me. But now I have ditched you for a long time to come.”

  “It’s my father’s way of saying he left me money.” I had written it last night.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “I went back to the river where the houseboat was. I hadn’t seen him much the last few years. Figured that was one place I knew he had been. If there was going to be a clue, that would be a good place to look. He had buried the note in the sand against the rock wall. Marked the spot with a circle on the rocks. It was something he showed me when I was a kid. I looked on a map. The coordinates are for a cave he used to take me to. He liked to explore caves.”

  McColl and I stared at each other for a long moment. I could see him trying to decide what to say. This was taking too long. All that was important was that he bought the story.

  I said, “What role do you see for me?”

  “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot, Lieutenant. You’re just the kind of man we have been looking for. With your gift for languages and ability to go undercover, we see you transferred to Iraq and stationed near Kirkuk. From there, you’ll be able to operate in advance of the event. We have allies there but it would be a big help to know which are most trustworthy. We’ve been aware of you for some time, Lieutenant. The undercover mission in Afghanistan was a test and you passed. You’re in the right place now.”

  McColl didn’t come out and claim Captain Ballard was part of his group and I couldn’t imagine he was. If that mission was a test, it had to be in the sense that someone in the group became aware of it and kept an eye on it for recruiting purposes.

  I did not like the notion of secret tests. I liked having the option to decide to fail. Failure was not an option for this bunch; it was destiny.

  30.

  Traffic—no, not traffic. Traffic moves. Eight lanes of cars, trucks and tuk-tuks and motor bikes, engines running, drivers sweating, swearing, singing along to the radio, talking on cell phones, shrugging shoulders, shaking heads, edging each other out for a five-foot advantage. Kabul. Not a war zone but an occupied city. It was easier to walk to the NATO headquarters than to ride. But when I got there, I realized I did not want to go inside. I didn’t want to change out of my Afghan identity or explain myself to the guards. Distrust swirled in front of me like a wraith. I walked close to the barriers and watched the soldiers watching me suspiciously, and as I prepared my explanations of why I should be admitted, I kept being delayed by the thought that I suspected them, too. My instinct was to stride forward and toy with their paranoia, then vaporize it, but the closer I got, the slower I went. Like forces repel; my paranoia met theirs, and the force field became impenetrable.

  I retreated to a shop and bought a phone and called Major Jenkins. He came to the shop and I made him wait while I watched for followers, his or mine. Every place I thought of where we could meet was either too public or too private until I remembered the one place where no one paid any attention to the surrounding crowd.

  The Soviet Cultural Center looked like it should: a bombed-out shell that resembled what a ’70s-era Phoenix apartment complex would look like if gangs had Stinger missiles. Afghan culture had taken over; the chefs were tasting their own creation: opium. Enough interior walls remained to give the place the feel of a maze, a sort of cherry of confusion on top of the despair sucked up in blue smoke. I stared at Jenkins outside the remnants of the fence long enough for him to finally recognize me, then let him follow me inside. In the land of a zillion rugs, almost everyone sat on the bumpy dirt floor. If they noticed us, we were only a distraction from the thin, ungraspable wisps that always vanished too soon, like satisfaction. We made our way to the eastern section, where the morning light came in through the windows and shell holes, driving the inhabitants away.

  Jenkins was not as uncomfortable as I was hoping he would be.

  “Captain Ballard is dead,” I said. If it bothered him, he hid it well. He listened patiently for the rest. I told him some of what I knew and that I had decided to carry on the mission. I expected a reprimand. Part of me even wanted it.

  “Have you met the sellers?”

  “No.” I liked Jenkins, but everyone’s first thought is how to survive. Maybe he knew Junior, too. Maybe he knew the general.

  “The deal is set for the day after tomorrow, fifteen hundred hours, outside of Jalalabad. Get me a GPS for my truck. You can station people in the hills with cameras. And you can block the road back. Pick them up.”

  “I can get you the money in a few hours and the GPS. But to get the support, we’ll have to go upstairs. I’ll try for choppers after you give the signal that the deal is done.”

  “Who is upstairs?”

  “Army CID.”

  My heart sank. Army CID might be good at arresting soldiers who get drunk and out of line, or go AWOL, or even those who get trigger-happy, but keeping secrets was not something they knew about. They knew about paperwork and procedure. And I knew there was no way around this. Jenkins had spoken it, so it was going to happen. “I won’t meet with them.” It was the most I could hope for.

  “They won’t come here anyway,” Jenkins said.

  “They wouldn’t be allowed in.”

  The next afternoon, Jenkins drove his jeep past the back side of NATO headquarters and I jumped in. The road was clear and we were on the outskirts of town in twenty minutes. He handed me a thick envelope of money. I counted out ninety thousand dollars.

  “We’ll collect the difference afterward,” he said. “You might have contingencies. When the transaction is complete, you signal the spotters by giving a thumbs-up to the sellers.”

  “Will there be spotters?”

  “We got the okay.”

  “Good, but no thumbs-up. These guys are not selling to a Marine, they’re selling to an Afghan. If the spotters can see my thumb, they can see that the transaction has gone down.”

  “Calm down.”

  “Ballard was calm. I didn’t see it happen, but I’m pretty sure the people I’m doing business with killed him. They’ll be standing behind me. The people standing in front of me are U.S. military traitors. I’m gonna take a wild guess that they might consider just ripping me off and leaving my body in the road. I’m the meat in the sandwich. Now I’ve got to rely on the timing and the subtlety of CID. Are you going to be there?”

  His mouth turned down and he looked all around, everywhere but at me, before he answered. “I’m a desk man. I have other operations I’m running. We didn’t start out to…This wasn’t the mission.” He was ashamed because he knew how asinine he sounded.

  This was all bad. If CID al
lowed the knowledge that I was a Marine in Afghan clothing to leak, the sellers would kill me, or Nawaz and Abed would. If CID did not know I was a Marine, then I was just an Afghan trying to steal rifles from the U.S. and they could shoot me. I realized that I preferred CID did not know my real identity. I believed more in their desire to obey the rules than in their ability to keep a secret; if I surrendered, there was a good chance they would rather arrest me than kill me. It’s how they thought.

  Jenkins reviewed the timing and location with great precision, trying in his bureaucratic way to reassure me. I pretended he had succeeded, shook his hand, and told him to pull over, and I hopped out of the jeep. I should have just disappeared right then.

  31.

  Some knockers on Mrs. Colonel, huh? C’mon, admit it, you’d love to get hold of them. We all would. He had to get her out of the military. It was just a matter of time before a senior officer claimed her, and McColl realized he was too ambitious to fight for her.” Blondie filled his mouth with eggs as he spoke. We sat in the dining room, having a last meal before heading out to not find the money. Unlike that moment on the base in Jalalabad, I was exhilarated at the prospect of taking this mission to the next level. If help had come, I would have ignored it.

  “She’s not my type,” I said.

  “Like you’d turnidown,” said Toothless, mushing it all together.

  “Too expensive.”

  “Said the man with twenty-five million dollars,” said Blondie. The shooter from Camp Pendleton came in with his partner, the tall guy. Their names were Stallworth and Pitt. They grunted their greetings and helped themselves to the food.

  “Money’s useless if you don’t know what to do with it,” I said. “That’s why you guys are the right men for this job.”

  “Whaddya mean?” Toothless put down his fork and tilted his head like a little kid.

  “If you were going to steal some of the money, you’d only take a little bit. That wouldn’t make you any more honest or loyal than someone who took it all. It’s just that twenty-five million is too much for you.” It’s very hard for someone with no imagination to imagine what that means. For Toothless, it meant I was talking about a dark place at the edge of the earth. He didn’t want to go there.

  “Whamakesyou think I’mstealing anything?”

  “Everyone thinks of it. You have to. Just like what Blondie said about the colonel’s woman. I didn’t say you were going to steal. Only that you had thought of it. And when you did, you wondered, why not take a little bit? And you did that because you can’t think about what you would do if you had it all.”

  I knew his next line: “I cantoo.”

  “He’d get a solid gold tooth,” said Blondie.

  “Shut up.”

  Pitt said, “Twenty-five million lasts a long time when all you like is fifty-dollar whores and Budweiser.”

  I asked, “What would you do with it?”

  “Yeah, after yagave m’whores twennydollars for seconds,” said Toothless. He opened his mouth and showed off his gap to mark his wit. Blondie was staring at me. He wanted his turn.

  “Whores and booze. None of us wants the money because it scares us. No one thinking he could open a bar on the beach in Australia? Stake himself to NASCAR? Stallworth could buy his own chopper and start a search-and-rescue company.”

  “I’m not gonna be needing a job anytime soon,” Stallworth said. He also deserved to have no teeth.

  I looked at Blondie. “What would you do with the money?”

  “Money runs out,” he said. “You have to get something that keeps the money flowing.”

  “Bonds?”

  “Fear and respect. With twenty-five million, you’re a general, you give the orders. I’d do as I pleased and use the money to make people put up with it. Then it would be easy to always get more.” He looked around the table from face to face to let each of us know that he was ready to start, money or not, handing out the fear and demanding the respect.

  “So Blondie is the only one of us interested in taking all the money for himself?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Maybe we’ll all be working for him.”

  “He’s alreadygotall the knives hewants,” said Toothless. The others chuckled to duck away from Blondie’s anger. The cook with the white hair came in and started clearing plates.

  “I only brought it up because I haven’t counted the money or even seen it so I don’t know how much there is to start,” I said.

  Blondie got up. He came behind me and leaned close with both hands on my shoulders. He said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “I hope there’s no money.” We all knew what he meant. As he started to leave, McColl came in.

  “The equipment has arrived. On board in fifteen.” I downed the rest of my coffee and got up with the rest of the boys. The equipment amounted to hard hats with LED lights attached, ropes, and APRS walkie-talkies, which I hoped wouldn’t work too well underground. We were going spelunking in southern Arizona to find the money.

  We took two AH-1 Cobra helicopters. Why we needed attack helicopters remained a mystery. Jessica flew one bird, and I rode with Pitt, Toothless, and Stallworth in the other. I could tell because of the way they were quiet and avoided looking at each other that they were thinking about the money. Our bird flew ahead and circled the spot a few times to check for an ambush. The coordinates took us east of Tucson and south of I-10. Pitt hovered over the spot while we all tried to see something meaningful on the ground, but there was no big pile of money and no cave entrance. After circling for a while, Pitt found a flat spit of land between a steep corrugated incline that led to a plateau and gentler-looking, sloping hills on our right.

  Dan’s hideout was on a boat; mine was in a cave. I was ten years old when Johnny Tully, the brother of one of Dan’s girlfriends, asked me if I wanted to come along for a ride to find buried treasure. He was just out of juvie home, where he had come across a map, “a genuine treasure map.” The treasure, in that case, being fifty kilos of Colombian marijuana. I never knew what he was hopped up on. He could barely sit still in the driver’s seat. The map was my domain. Of course, it was a complete fake. There was no buried dope, but I found a cave and crawled in with a flashlight. Johnny was too scared to follow me, and after all the hiking he was soaked in sweat and his eyes were even scarier than when we started out: an American eagle who blinked a lot. I waited until he stopped yelling at me to come out because I had the wrong cave. I could peek out and see him turning the map around in his shaking hands. It wasn’t long before he crumpled the map and sank to the ground and lay there shivering, so I crawled out and gave him some water. It was almost dark when he woke up, but we found our way back to the truck, and he managed to drive home after a quick stop at McDonald’s. Dan and his girlfriend made a big fuss about me and acted as if they had actually noticed I was gone. They damned Johnny and took away his truck for a week, even though I swore we had been at the movies and stayed to see a couple of different pictures without paying extra. Johnny got sent to prison almost as soon as he turned eighteen, armed robbery and assault, and I never heard of him getting out. I kept the map.

  The cave became my refuge. After my first deployment in Afghanistan, and after Officer Candidate School, I began prepping the cave whenever I had leave. When Gladden gave me a hard time about going to Arizona, I was at the cave, preparing a place to hide out if I decided to go permanently AWOL. I never thought I’d be leading anyone here, but it was the spot that would give me the greatest advantage.

  The cave had two entrances that I knew of. I led the group around, missing the smaller entrance a few times to increase their eagerness and impatience. The naked sun bothered McColl. “Are we getting close?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “They don’t make Geiger counters for money, Colonel,” I said. Then, to soften it, “It’s just been a really long time since I was here.”

  The entrance required us to
crawl in one at a time. McColl and Jessica, who would be waiting outside, would have no good spot to rest there while they waited for us. They would guard it like a mouse hole.

  GPS doesn’t work in caves, but it was not clear that McColl understood that. He held on to his little tracker as if it were going to save him. Toothless squeezed inside first. I fed him the ropes and extra lamps, then followed him. Blondie, Pitt, and Stallworth came inside next. I warned them all again that I had not been there since I was a little kid so I didn’t know my way around too well.

  We were in a narrow, rocky corridor about ten yards long. Pitt, Stallworth, and Toothless toted the ropes.

  “It’s been a long time,” I said.

  “You go first. Slowly,” said Blondie. I crawled forward until the ceiling rose and soon after that the walls widened and we faced a huge room with a soaring ceiling and a floor of sharp-edged boulders sloping downward. We stopped, shined our flashes all around. Blondie gave me the signal to head forward. I moved my light from side to side, making sure to aim toward the walls every so often. The roof had no stalactites in here, just boulders that looked like they might fall out at any moment.

  We reached a spot where the floor sloped away more sharply. The lights would not shine far enough for us to see anything. It felt like the edge of the world. I looked back at Blondie for instructions. “I think there’s a shaft ahead. There might be a way around it. I’m not sure. Want me to check it out?”

  “Slowly.”

  I edged forward, bracing myself and shining my light back and forth. I slipped, on purpose, but quickly caught myself and moved along. Ahead, I could see pale stalactites hanging like giant shark teeth. The rocks ended in a cliff edge and I peered down carefully and shined the light. The drop was only about thirty feet to a flat surface about twenty feet wide and then a pool of dark water: a beach with no sun. I signaled the others to come forward. We all shined our lights to suss out the task. The water seemed to flow off to a passage on the right. Blondie yelled, “There! Go back!” He shined his light on a spot against the left wall that I had just passed over. Five lights swept back and forth and settled on a dusty backpack tucked in a nook in the side wall. Right where I had left it two days before.