by AJ Stewart
“It is true. But this area, it was once a very nice place. Many rich families lived here. Friends of Saddam. But it was bombed in the war. Not many people stayed.”
“Understood.” Fontaine looked at his driver. The man was not old but he looked more aged than the average European. Sun and war would do that to a person.
“Do you have a family, Yusuf?”
“Yes, sayidi. My wife and I have two girls.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yes, nice, but difficult. It is not such a good time for girls.”
“How so?”
“With the Americans going, there is much uncertainty. Perhaps the democracy will work but perhaps it will not. And if not, there are some in Islam who would like laws that are not good for girls. You see?”
Fontaine nodded. He saw.
The convoy broke apart half a mile from the meet. Hutton flanked left, Manu flanked the other vehicle right. Yusuf drove straight into the suburb that used to house many of Saddam’s friends.
Not anymore.
There were some large homes, behind high walls and iron gates. The size of the homes and the lots spoke of opulence. But there was also plenty of rubble. Many of the structures that remained were incomplete and abandoned. Missing roofs, or walls open to the elements. The roads were dirt and pot-holed. The Army Corp of Engineers had not performed their magic here.
Yusuf took a second look at the directions and stopped short of a two-story apartment building. It had been hit by a mortar round a long time ago. On the top floor only one wall stood, and what had once been a home was open to the elements. A sand drift had formed against the solitary wall. Fontaine wondered if they had the right place. The lower level was darkened but seemed intact. He surveyed the scene. Once, and then again.
“Anything?” he said to his radio.
“Nothing to your north or east,” replied Gorecki.
“There’s an army jeep, a block back to the west,” said Hutton. “It’s empty.”
“Okay,” said Fontaine. “I’m going in.”
Fontaine stepped out and spoke back through the window to Yusuf.
“Anything goes wrong, you get out of here. Okay?”
“Yes, sayidi. I wait here for you.”
Fontaine pushed away from the vehicle and walked toward the apartment building. “That isn’t what I said,” he mumbled to himself.
The lower apartment was right on the street front. No yard. It still had bars across the windows. The door hung open, dark within despite the clear hot day. Fontaine stepped across the breach and stopped.
“Hello?” he called.
“In the back,” came the reply.
Fontaine took his time moving through the dark room. It looked like a living space. Big enough for a sofa and maybe a dining table. But it was empty. As his eyes adjusted he saw a short hallway, and he passed a small room to the side, and then another. Bedrooms. The walls were exposed cinderblock but had been painted at some point years earlier. Fontaine couldn’t guess the color. At the end of the hall he saw a dim light, so he stepped toward it and stuck his head around into the rearmost room.
It was a kitchen. Most of the fittings had been ripped out, but a steel sink lay discarded in the corner. There was a table and three chairs. In the middle of the table sat an army-issue camping lantern. It didn’t hiss so Fontaine assumed it ran on rechargeable batteries. The light it emitted spread across the table and threw vague shadows on the walls. It was just enough to light the man sitting at the table. He wasn’t dressed in standard issue uniform—certainly not for a sortie outside of the confirmed field of operations. This guy was breaking all the rules. He had come alone. He wasn’t wearing an army combat uniform. He wore an olive green t-shirt under olive green body armor. His battle dress coat hung from the back of the chair. He wore no side plates to protect his arms, and he had removed his combat helmet, which sat on the table beside the lamp.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Fontaine, stepping into the kitchen.
“Take a seat,” said Dennison.
Fontaine pulled out a chair. It scraped across the concrete floor. The building was solidly built. Just not against a mortar round. Fontaine sat but did not remove his helmet.
“I hear you’re after something,” said Dennison. He spoke through a small mouth that didn’t match his large head. He wasn’t in any kind of shape, and Fontaine wondered if that was typical of the entire army or just the quartermasters. His hair was shaved so close as to be no more than a suggestion.
“No,” said Fontaine.
“Are you wasting my time?”
“No.”
“So what do you want?”
“I want everything.”
Dennison sat relaxed in his chair like a Wall Street executive in his fancy office. He looked at Fontaine.
“You want to take off your helmet?”
“No.”
Dennison nodded and frowned. “I don’t know you.”
“No reason you should. I’m not in your army.”
“But you were.”
Fontaine shrugged.
“Where?” asked Dennison.
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is I’m here now, and I’m going to be staying here. After you guys bug out. And I hear you’re the guy with the kind of stockpile of goods that fighting men might need that their superiors might not provide.”
“And you want the stockpile?”
“I want the business. Lock, stock and barrel. You’re leaving town. I want to buy your business.”
Dennison nodded.
Fontaine could see the cogs working overtime. The guy was cautious, that was for sure. The US Army didn’t take kindly to the activities that Dennison was involved in. They might turn a blind eye to a bit of contraband alcohol or even prescription drug use. War was hard. The public would never understand just how hard. Civilians took Xanax after a tough day at the office. These guys saw their buddies get blown to pieces, and there was a prohibition on drinking at Camp Victory. The two stories didn’t add up. So the army might be institutionally lazy about investigating such things, but it would draw the line at munition sales, of that he was damn sure. That was more than a PR problem. So Dennison had been careful enough to not be caught. Yet Fontaine had seen his type before. A hundred times. He was a grifter. And there was nothing a grifter longed for more than that one last big score.
“Who you with?” Dennison asked.
“Securiform Associates,” said Fontaine. It was the security company his old comrade McConnell now worked for, and was big enough for Dennison not to know everyone, or for any contact he had within the company to not know everyone, either. In all, Securiform Associates had over two thousand sets of boots on the ground.
“Big guys.”
Fontaine nodded. “And there are a lot of other contractors.”
“I know,” smiled Dennison. It wasn’t a happy smile. “What can you handle?”
“Everything.”
“I got all kinds of stuff. Some of it’s pretty specialized.”
“I’ll take it. Give me an inventory and give me a price.”
“Payment?”
“You got an offshore account?”
Dennison shook his head.
“You should get one. I’m sure you’ve got money you need to get out of country.”
“I’m still here for a few months. Don’t know if I want to lose the business just yet.”
“You pass things over to me now, you get a cut until the day you leave. Let’s call it a hand-over fee.”
“You’re very flexible.”
“It’s got to be win-win, right? Doesn’t work any other way.”
Dennison sat in silence for a moment. The cogs, going hard.
“It will take a few days to get a price.”
“I got time.”
Again silence, and then Dennison stood. Fontaine followed. Dennison put out his hand, and Fontaine shook it. Dennison’s hands were soft.
“I’ll be in touch.”
Fontaine walked back to the SUV. Yusuf sat inside, windows down but with the engine off. It was well over forty degrees inside—a hundred degrees in the old money. Yusuf turned the key when he saw Fontaine appear and the AC kicked on, fighting in vain. Fontaine waited until Yusuf had pulled around and was heading back toward the Green Zone before he spoke.
“You guys hear that?”
Hutton responded. “The fish is on the hook.”
Staff Sergeant Dennison’s CO gave him a sideways look as he wandered into the storeroom when he arrived back at Camp Victory. They were performing inventory and deciding which goods would go and which goods would stay. Dennison was in charge of food distribution. It was a big job. Thousands of hungry mouths needing to be fed every day. And fed well. Any slipups in the food supply and it would be on some DC blog before the sun went down. But the number of mouths was falling every day. And no foodstuffs would be shipped out. Dennison was still shipping in, and would be until the end. Anything left would stay. A gift to the Iraqi armed forces, or whoever the hell wanted it after they were long gone. So he really didn’t have a lot to do. His CO expected him to assist with stocktaking in other areas. The CO didn’t see a lot of that happening. He wasn’t surprised but he was beyond busting him for it. Dennison was no kind of quartermaster in his CO’s eyes. Sloppy and fat and lazy. Probably up to no good. But in a couple of months his CO would be back at Fort Lee, his tour done. He would return to training at Quartermaster HQ in Virginia, enjoying the air-conditioning and his wife’s cooking and getting reacquainted with his golf clubs. And Ox Dennison would be reassessed by the shrinking United States Army. Like most of the stores in the warehouse, he would become army surplus, and he would be gone from the CO’s life for good.
Dennison was excited. So excited he almost didn’t make the call. This was none of their business anyway. But after he finished his shift he had come to the decision that they had told him to report any interest, and their business or not, they had a long memory and a longer reach. He went back to his quarters, a portable cabin that, like most of the other millions of dollars of infrastructure, would be staying behind. He fished out a duffel from below his cot and took out the lock box inside. From the box he took a plain flip phone. Powered it up and made one call. He told them it was not specific interest in their thing, it was interest in his. He told them the guy’s name and the company he worked for. They said they would check it out, and not to do anything until they said otherwise. He told them he needed this deal. He knew the army would be done with him once he was back stateside. He needed this last score. They asked if he was listening. They asked if he remembered. He said he did. He wouldn’t do anything until they got back to him. He hung up the call and turned off the phone and put it back in the lockbox, which he put in the duffel. He kicked the duffel back under the cot with an angry grunt.
Chapter Six
Fontaine sat reading in the small hotel courtyard. The shade covered his chair but the sun crept steadily toward him. He had risen early with his men and completed a ten-kilometer run before the heat made it uncomfortable. He knew the men would be waiting the way they always did. His team was good at waiting. They did a lot of it. They were like the American football teams Fontaine watched on television as a boy—lots of standing around on the sidelines waiting, punctuated with short bursts of frenetic activity. This was their second day since the meet with Dennison. It was no kind of record for them. So Fontaine read. Babar would sit quietly in a trance-like state, and then arise to eat. Gorecki and Manu would play cards. Gin rummy and 500. Thorn would seek out some kind of mechanical or technological device and pull it apart so he could put it back together again. During operations in Africa he had fixed a ham radio that was a village’s only means to call for medical care, and in South America he repaired a broken-down Fargo truck that had been sitting in a barn for thirty years. In Kandahar he had scrounged parts and built a personal computer for a school whose previous machine had been stolen for the precious metals inside.
The door hissed open and footsteps came toward him. Light footfalls on crushed stone. He caught Hutton’s scent before she reached him. He kept reading. She stood before him and pushed the book back some so she could see the cover.
“Le stress de la vie?” she read.
Fontaine nodded.
“What is that?”
“The stress of life.”
“It’s French.”
“Oui.”
“Any good?”
“This guy wouldn’t know stress if a paratroop regiment of the stuff landed on his head.”
Hutton took the vacant chair next to Fontaine.
“You read French.”
“Aha.”
He kept reading and she watched him do it.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said.
“I find the best assumption to be that there’s always something someone’s not telling you.”
“You get that from your little book there? Pop psychology?”
He closed the book. “No, I got that from the other hundred psychology books I’ve read. This one just tells me I need to breathe more.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment but he felt her looking at him.
“I’ve got a copy of Dennison’s army jacket.”
Fontaine glanced at her and she held up a manila folder.
“Anything interesting?” he asked.
“It’s light reading. The DoD doesn’t like to share. He’s from Pennsylvania, one of two siblings, parents are deceased. Reading between the lines, he joined up because his brother ended up in jail and there were no better options. Been a quartermaster most of his career. Nothing here about any illegal activity. But I wouldn’t expect it. Like I say, the DoD doesn’t like to share.”
Fontaine nodded.
Hutton slipped the folder under her arm. “I’m going to our training center to run a sim for the locals on storming a building without blowing it up. Wanna come?”
Fontaine shrugged. “You know how to do that?”
“I read it in a book. How hard can it be?” She smiled and her face tightened across her cheeks and gave her color.
“Why not? What else would I do?”
He dropped the book back at the informal take one-leave one library that sat on a set of old shelves in the corner of the lobby, and followed Hutton to the door. He didn’t make it.
Fontaine saw the man from the corridor. He was standing at attention by the door like a soldier, but he wasn’t dressed like a soldier. He was dressed in similar gear to Fontaine, a plain sand-colored uniform, pressed and neat and new. He wore a black beret with no insignia but the headwear itself was a badge. His hair was black and his nose was pure Gaul. His eyes slowly moved around the lobby and the lounge, assessing and watching. He was clearly waiting for someone, and the lift of his chin told Fontaine he was that someone.
“Adjudant Fontaine?” asked the man despite knowing exactly who he was talking to.
Fontaine nodded. “Where?” he asked in English.
“Par ici,” said the soldier, gesturing back into the hotel.
Fontaine turned to Hutton. “I’ll have to miss this one.”
“Is this our thing?”
“No,” he said, glancing at the soldier. “I’ll update you later. Okay?”
She frowned at Fontaine and then at the soldier.
“Do that,” she said. She walked out into the sunlight and Fontaine turned and followed the soldier. He marched down the corridor by the courtyard but stopped halfway. Tapped on a set of double doors but didn’t wait for an answer. He opened one of the doors and stepped back to allow Fontaine to enter first.
The room was exactly like Hutton’s workroom, except that it was almost empty. No tables, no lectern. Just two chairs facing each other in the middle of the space. One of the chairs was occupied by a stern-faced man in a blue suit. He wore a matching tie and crisp white shirt. He might have looked like a businessman. Fontaine guessed that wa
s the look he was going for. He wasn’t fooling anyone. Not around here. The short back and sides, the set jaw and air of superiority were all too military. The giveaway was the footwear. Black boots, shined to a mirror.
The man gestured for Fontaine to sit before him. Fontaine did, as the soldier behind him stepped out of the room and closed the door.
The man in the suit spoke French. “Do you know who I am?”
In Fontaine’s experience, there were three kinds of men. Those who were well known and knew it. Those who were not well known and knew it. And those who had to ask.
“Général Thoreaux,” said Fontaine.
The man flapped his eyelids. “I come with important news.”
Fontaine waited.
“You are to be congratulated for your efforts. Your country thanks you.”
Fontaine said nothing.
“But now you are here in Iraq.” The general leaned back as much as he could while still sitting perfectly upright. “In a territory we have no operations in. Peculiar, yes?”
“I go where my orders take me, mon Général.”
General Thoreaux nodded as if this were the only acceptable answer. “Bien sûr,” he said. “So no doubt you feel your talents are wasted here. We have much important work for your people to do.”
Fontaine said nothing.
The general took a deep breath. Fontaine wondered if the general had read about breathing in a psychology book.
“So, you will cease your current operations in this country. France cannot be seen to be undertaking military activities in this theater. You will stay here and await your orders. I would expect a return to France, yes?”
“Merci beaucoup, mon Général.”
The general nodded definitively and Fontaine took the hint and stood. The general stayed seated.
“You should take a break. Relax. Your men deserve this. I would advise you enjoy the hospitality of the hotel.”
“Oui, mon Général.”
Fontaine turned and marched to the door. As he reached it the general spoke.
“Adjudant?”
Fontaine turned.
“The Legion does not salute superior officers?”
