Schag felt an uneasiness form in the pit of his stomach. He didn't know much about the company itself, but he remembered the last time he'd heard the name. It was three years before, in a hotel bar in Bahrain. The last time he had seen Bill Butcher.
☼
"I tell you, Lin," Butcher said. "You won't believe the corruption going on in Iraq. It's like the Wild West. Totally lawless."
They were sitting at a table in the Dublin Club, a bar and nightclub popular with American sailors. Hardwood tables sat on a well-varnished hardwood floor. Lamps with ornate shades lit the bar where a few sailors in civilian clothes were throwing back shooters. Other customers dug into steaks and chicken wings at the tables, the overhead lighting just enough to let them know what they were putting into their mouths. An empty stage reputed to host the best bands in Europe dominated the far end of the club. Large-screen plasma televisions hung from two walls, flashing a never-ending stream of sports news.
Schag had flown into Bahrain on a COD flight, escorting a prisoner from the Halsey's battle group to the regional NCIS office for transfer back to the States for a court martial. COD officially stood for Carrier Onboard Delivery, but most passengers felt Crash on Deck was a more fitting title. Butcher came over from Iraq to assist the regional staff with an investigation. They had run into each other at the regional headquarters, and decided to have dinner and drinks at the Dublin Club.
"Those damn contractors—my god, don't get me started." In truth, Butcher didn't need prodding to go on. "They're all crooks in my book."
He leaned his elbows on the table and pointed a finger at Schag, the overhead light glinting off his cleanly shaved head.
"The Navy contracted with one company to build some barracks. They did such a shitty job they managed to electrify a shower stall. It electrocuted the first sailor who took a shower. We started an investigation, but orders came down to drop it. The company skated."
"Who ordered you?"
Butcher's eyes lifted toward the ceiling, a gesture meaning the order came from higher up.
Schag asked, "How high up?"
Butcher rolled his eyes even higher, looked at Schag and shrugged. "Pretty damn high, Lin. It seems the fucking contractors have immunity from prosecution."
Butcher barely paused before rushing on.
"You remember the battle of Fallujah?" he asked. Schag nodded. Fallajah was an Iraqi city that insurgents had taken over. Two battles were fought for control of the city, the second the bloodiest of the war. "We were taking so many casualties, our docs and corpsmen ran out of medical supplies. The corpsmen were going into homes and tearing sheets off beds to use as bandages. We started to investigate why our medical warehouses were so low on supplies. You know what we found?"
"Black marketeering?" Schag said.
Butcher nodded his head, again with exaggeration.
"Some of these security firms were drawing medical supplies, more than their motley numbers would need," he said. "Know where we found them? On the dead and wounded insurgents. The contractors were selling them on the black market."
Schag sipped his beer and shook his head. "That's not unheard of," he said.
Butcher leaned over the table and tapped it with an index finger.
"Yeah, but it isn't just your run of the mill black marketing," he said. "We've got evidence of them smuggling drugs into Iraq to sell to our troops, and weapons to sell to the insurgents."
"And you couldn't bust them?"
Butcher sat back in his chair, a look of disgust twisting his face.
"A couple got their hands slapped and sent home, but not one of those shit heads went to jail."
Schag sipped his beer and let Butcher vent. His friend seemed to have a need to let go of pent-up frustration and anger. The best thing he could do for Butcher was to act like a psychiatrist, and shut up, and listen.
"The worst group," Butcher said, "is Gideon Security International. Ever hear of them?"
Schag nodded.
"Yeah. Big outfit. Lots of political mojo, right?'
Butcher blew air through pursed lips and rolled his eyes up.
"Big mojo," he said, "and they use it to pull off every scam they can think of. They claim to have nothing but the top security operators in the world, and the guy who runs it, Aidan Black, claims to be a former Green Beret. Yeah, well we ran backgrounds on some of his guys. We found ex-cons and a bunch of former Latin American death-squad members."
Snorting, Butcher shook his head again, slower this time.
"And it turned out this Aidan Black was a psychological warfare officer assigned to Special Forces to write propaganda. The son-of-bitch never even deployed. He trained up for two missions. The first was Somalia, but he ended up breaking his leg at the last minute and couldn't deploy. I don't know what the second mission was, but I heard he came down with some heart palpitations or something, and they held him back. After that, he was given some kind of medical discharge, and the teams were happy to see him go."
Butcher sipped his beer. His eyebrows rose, and he set the glass down.
"I doubt he realizes it, but Black chose the perfect name for his company," he said.
Knitting his brow, Schag mulled it over before saying, "Gideon? It's from the Old Testament. He was an Israelite general, wasn't he? Won some big battle." Butcher, a devout Catholic, nodded. "So, Black wanted to project a sense of strength and protection. Makes good business sense."
"Not for a man who claims to be a church-going Christian," Butcher said.
Schag watched Butcher's toothy smile spread across his face. Schag's eyebrows rose in question.
"Gideon won that big battle by fooling the Midianites with a phony army, just like Black is fooling the U.S. government with a phony security service."
They shared a laugh over that. Bill Butcher sat back and rubbed his lips thoughtfully. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, sadder.
"It would be fine if all they were only harmless fools, but they hurt people, and not only Iraqis. There was this one young girl, a college student hired to work in one of the gedunks—you know, the PX or something. Why the hell such a young girl would want to go work in a war zone, I don't understand. Maybe she was saving up for college, who knows? Anyway, this Gideon op named Cavendish and two his goons slipped her some ruffies, and gang raped her. They left her unconscious in a cargo container to sleep off the ruffies, and forgot about her. You have any idea how hot those containers get during the summer in the desert? By the time someone found her, her body temperature was so high she had suffered irreparable brain damage."
Butcher fell silent again. His head shook with disgust at the memory. Schag watched his friend a moment, then asked the obvious. "No prosecution, right?"
The ends of Butcher's lip tugged down and he shook his head. "I heard later that the girl's family tried a civil suit, but Gideon claimed immunity again."
He grabbed his beer and took a savage draw from it. He swished the beer around in mouth as if ridding himself of some awful taste. When he finished, he looked across the table at Schag.
"But the big thing," he said, "the biggest scam that happened out there was—" His voiced lowered to a confidential murmur. "—the money."
"What money?"
Butcher leaned across the wooden table toward Schag.
"Did you know the administration confiscated some forty billion—billion—dollars from Saddam's overseas bank accounts?" Schag nodded, having read news reports of the administration's plans. "Yeah, well, did you know it was in cash? They just packed up that cash and shipped it to Baghdad. Planeload after planeload. Most of it went to contractors for building stuff, but no one bothered with niceties like receipts. But we know $8.9 billion of it simply disappeared. Disappeared. Came off the plane and was never seen again. Nearly nine billion in cash. The largest bank heist in history and no one investigated it."
Schag had read news reports of the disappearance of the money, but he considered them rumors rather than fact.
>
"Are you saying that actually happened?"
Butcher nodded once, and hit the table with his beer bottle. "As real as I'm sitting here."
"And you're saying no one investigated it?"
"We weren't allowed to," Butcher said. "And I mean no one, Lin. Not NCIS, Army CID, Air Force Special Investigations, not the FBI, DEA, or CIA. Nobody. We had a task force set up for joint investigations and when we started to look into it, we got our chain pulled hard."
"Nine billion in cash can't just disappear, Bill. Someone had to know where it went."
Butcher shook his head. "Lin, the Viceroy's staff was handing out duffle bags stuffed with cash. They couldn't fully account for the cash they know they handed out." Viceroy was the nickname given to the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, the American-led military occupational government. It harkened back to the days of European imperialism when a viceroy appointed by a king lorded over an overseas colony. Many in the military and the State Department felt there were strong similarities in the American occupation of Iraq. "But this nine billion just vanished."
Butcher stifled a beer-generated belch. "Well, there's nothing I can do for that kid," he said. "But that money? That I can still do something about."
Schag didn't like the look on Butcher's face. He wondered if his friend was getting drunk. "What's that mean, Bill? You said you were told to stand down on that investigation."
Butcher smirked and pointed the mouth of his bottle toward Schag.
"The joint task force was ordered to stand down, Lin," he said. "But I've got time on my hands. I've made a few inquiries. I'll make some more."
"Bucking orders is dangerous, Bill. Good way to end up on the carpet."
"Since when does the Linus Schag I've come to know and love care if he gets called on the carpet? I've seen you cuss out a Marine Corps full colonel as if he was a boot recruit. You getting soft in your old age?"
Schag smiled at the memory and sipped his beer.
Butcher glanced at the large dive watch on his left wrist, and stood. "I've got to run, Lin. Gotta Skype the old lady and kids." He held out his hand, and Schag shook it. "Listen, next time you're back in the States, come see us. I know Yolanda would love to see you. The kids, too."
"I'd like that, Bill," Schag said. "And keep your damn nose clean, for your family's sake."
Butcher didn't respond. He was already winding his way through the tables toward the door. Schag watched him sidestep a couple of drunken swabbies, swing open the door, and disappear into the night outside.
That had been three years before, and as Schag drove south toward San Diego, his hands gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.
"My God, Bill," he murmured. "What have you done?"
CHAPTER 3
Monday
Point Loma Yacht Club
San Diego, California
0830 Hours
THE SECURITY GUARD WATCHED THE gray pickup truck approach the gate and stood up. He waited for the driver to pull opposite the guard shack. It was raining, and he didn't want to get any wetter than he needed to. His arthritis was already acting up.
"Can I help you?" he asked the driver.
The driver hooked a thumb toward the truck's cargo bed behind him. "I'm here to clean a hull," he said.
The guard glanced into the back of the truck and saw scuba gear, brushes, and hull scrappers. Underwater hull cleaning services were regular visitors to the yacht club. It was cheaper to hire a diver to scrape off barnacles while a boat was still in the water than to have a boat yard haul it into dry dock to do the job.
"Where you going?" the guard asked.
The driver wore a dark-blue watch cap, a wet suit, and, despite the overcast, dark wrap-around sunglasses. He picked up a piece of paper from the passenger seat and read off a dock number.
"Okay," said the guard. He pointed to a group of parking slots reserved for club guests. "Park over there and carry your gear through that gate. It should be to your right."
The driver flashed a wide, toothy grin, thanked the guard, and drove on.
☼
The yacht club sat on the edge of San Diego Bay's Shelter Island, and stretched its finger-like docks out into the cove created by the man-made island's southern spur. A squat two-story wooden clubhouse overlooked the docks like a Scottish castle brooding over the moors. The great, wide windows, fogged by the early morning chill, looked down on vessels representing the gamut of pleasure boating, from small single-masted daysailers to large ocean-going motor yachts and multi-masted sailing vessels. There were few members in the clubhouse at this hour to look out. Even fewer stirred on the rain-dampened decks of the boats. Bill Butcher was counting on that.
He sat on the edge of the dock, a single air tank strapped to his back, flippers on his feet, and looked out over the water. The gray overcast reflected off the surface and gave the water the color of pewter. Rainbows of color danced here and there on the surface, created from the sheen of spilled fuel. Butcher spat into his mask and smeared it around with his fingers, coating the glass to prevent it from fogging underwater. After placing the mask over his face, he gripped the air regulator in his mouth, took two test breaths, grabbed a hull scrapper, and slipped into the water.
He had no use for the scrapper, or any of the cleaning equipment he carted down to the dock. It was all decoration, part of his disguise to get into the yacht club. Nor did he have any interest in the yawl he appeared to be cleaning. His target was a large motor sailer tied up three docks over. He swam over to it, keeping under the moored yachts as much as he could to hide his air bubbles. What he wouldn't give for a rebreather. But he had to settle for whatever he could steal from the dive shop he broke into during the night after driving back from the Gideon compound.
Butcher surfaced, his mask barely above the water, and eyed his target. The motor sailer was one of those half sailboat, half motor yacht vessels that rich people chose when they couldn't decide what kind of yachtsman they wanted to be—canvas slapper or a stink pot. With a built-in engine and a single tall mast, the motor sailer could cut through the sea under power or slice through it under sail. But it did neither very well.
This one had a fifty-foot, dark-blue hull topped by a white gunwale, deck, and cabin. He recognized it from the photos he'd studied, but to be sure he swam toward the stern and read its name: FREE ENTERPRISE. No surprise there, Butcher thought. What else would he name it?
Slipping beneath the water again, Butcher moved toward the bow of the boat. There he pulled a black, brick-like object from a bag hanging from his weight belt. At one end was a small propeller. Two flanges angled out from the top, with two screw holes in each flange. Pulling a small, pump-action hand drill from the same bag, he placed the object against the hull and drilled holes through each of the screw holes. He replaced the drill in the bag, removed four screws, and fingered them into place. He replaced the bit drill with a screwdriver head, and used the drill to tighten the screws. When he finished, he removed a small cotter pin from the propeller shaft and tested its free movement. Butcher paused to admire his work, his mouth forming a grin around the regulator.
This would be his ace in the hole. The brick-like object held a quarter pound of improvised plastic explosive. Ah, the things you can whip up in the kitchen if you only had the right cookbook. This little specialty was courtesy of the CIA training he'd received in the SEALs. If his primary plan went to hell, this would complete the mission.
☼
Half an hour later, he was on Interstate 8 heading for the mountains, smiling contentedly. Only three days before he'd had no idea how to proceed. He'd been stumped, stonewalled at each attempt to bring to light what he had discovered. Those idiots at NCIS wouldn't listen. They ruined his reputation, forced him out of the agency, and they weren't about to admit they were wrong and take his evidence to court.
Then they had come after him. There were two of them, a short Hispanic with a Boston Blackie
moustache and a taller white guy with a shaved head and muscular build much like Butcher himself. He recognized them as Gideon mercenaries; the Hispanic was in Iraq the same time as Butcher. Caught with a cache of illegal weapons, he was sent back to the States with a slap on the wrist. Butcher tried to recall the guy's name. Was it Ruiz? Yes, that was it. Ruiz, a Rambo wannabe.
They were both amateurs, like most of Gideon's mercs, and Butcher easily spotted them tailing him. He didn't try to lose them, but let them follow him south from Salinas, where he'd been visiting his children, down to San Diego County and up into the mountains. Butcher's family had a summer cabin up there, and he'd been living in it since he and Yolanda separated. He used the time driving to think about what the two men wanted. Were they tailing him to see whom he was meeting, if anyone? Were they afraid he might go to the press? Maybe they planned to run him off the road, rough him up a bit, and threaten him to back off. Yeah, right. I'd like to see them try that, he told himself. Then another possibility came to mind. If that was it, Butcher knew he couldn't wait and see. He had to act first.
He led the Gideon men up the I-8 to Alpine, a small mountain town outside the Cleveland National Forest, and stopped for dinner at a mom-and-pop diner he frequented. It was tucked beneath a copse of trees well off the beaten path. It had been snowing, and the undisturbed blanket of snow covering the diner's parking lot told Butcher there would be few people inside.
He took his time eating, watching the Gideon mercs' dark-blue Nissan parked a several yards down the road, close enough to watch the entrance to the restaurant and his own car, but far enough away, they assumed, not to attract his attention. He didn’t see anyone leave the vehicle, so he knew they both were still inside it.
Butcher rose, paid his bill, and walked toward the single, unisex restroom. He knew there was a backdoor next to the restroom. He tested the backdoor's handle. It was unlocked. He slipped out the door and trotted quietly past the trash dumpsters into the woods, angling obliquely to the left, going deeper into the woods, and moving toward the Nissan. In five minutes, he was parallel to them but still hidden in the shadows of the trees. He pulled up his right trouser leg, revealing an ankle holster holding a Glock 26, the so-called Baby Glock for its compactness. He drew it and crept forward.
The Butcher's Bill (The Linus Schag, NCIS, Thrillers Book 2) Page 2
