Caravan of Thieves

by David Rich

  “I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else and never will. I never had anything in this life that I didn’t steal. Never, nothing.”

  I laid out for him why I was there and how I got there: Shaw, Gladden, the whole thing, including the shooters who were after me. Dan brightened up considerably when I told him about being undercover in Afghanistan.

  “You posed as an Afghan? That’s marvelous. And these American soldiers bought it. I always knew you had potential.”

  “We should get out of here. I stole that car in Vegas and it’ll be found at the landing. These guys have the means to put it all together,” I said.

  “And you think the general put the shooters onto you?”

  “He’s after me. There was an incident, a bad one.”

  “Don’t be so sure the general is behind it. Doesn’t sound right to me.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t care about that right now. Those shooters weren’t likely to be the first to show up on that river. “Where can we go?”

  “Wait,” he said. “I want to know…You set these guys up in Afghanistan, you got them to trust you.”

  Was this the moment to say “I learned it all from you. You deserve all the credit”? His flickering eyes and pleased smile seemed to offer warmth and refuge. Inclusion. But I knew the trap: warm yourself at that fire and you’ll freeze to death. For a moment, I thought he could not help it: those were his eyes and his smile, all he had. Dan was looking at me with something resembling pride. I felt vaguely ashamed.

  “So you had to fool Afghans, too. Who was tougher to fool, us or them?”

  “Dan, I’ll tell you all about it when we’re on the road.”

  “Three days ago, I had driven out to New River City to try to collect on a job we did at a new development. The boss wasn’t in. The secretary looked kinda cute and pretty soon we were on the boss’s couch together. It was easy. Real easy. I’m not bragging, I’m telling you this for a reason. She got up to go into the bathroom to freshen up. Took her purse and took her time. I wandered over to the desk where she had USA Today. They have a page with news from every state. I always check Oklahoma. It said the graves of three veterans of Iraq had been dug up. Two of the bodies were left alone, but the third was missing. The secretary had to be pretty fresh by then, but she was getting fresher still. I stood by the door and heard a few words and then she hung up her phone. They’d gotten to her. They had contacted her before I got there and were paying her to keep me there. These guys have resources. I don’t think there’s a better place than where we are now.”

  Father and son with fish, beer, cigars, sunshine, and water. A borrowed boat and borrowed time, unless McColl conveniently had a heart attack. And Shaw, too. I spent the time listening unless he asked and prodded for war stories. My reluctance must have come off as youthful sullenness, but I was struggling to isolate each of my resentments and squash them. I wanted to make sure I had Dan right. Filling in that picture had been a lifetime quest, with all the gathered evidence and clues snatched from fleeting moments together or observations of Dan with his women, his cronies, his victims. Now it was uninterrupted access and I couldn’t stop staring into the fire, even though I knew I should run.

  I even watched him sleep. He was still a handsome man, rugged and strong. I tried to guess how old he was, but it was just a guess and the thought of asking made me laugh out loud. Questions weren’t paths to the truth or even to facts; they were cues to start the entertainment, or to change the channel and be captivated for a few more moments. No story ever came off as a rerun. Every moment was fresh; his smile would form and his eyes twinkle a bit and he’d ease in: “I was fishing on the Salmon River up in Oregon when a bear…” “Once, at a party in New York, a woman I’d never met before, very beautiful, came up and asked me to walk her home…” “They deputized me once in Santa Fe to help them catch a bank robber…”

  I was on deck, Dan was inside finishing his lunch on the second day, when a raft came around the upstream bend. The rifle was leaning against the rail about three feet from my left hand. The sun was directly overhead. A young man about my age was guiding the raft and a young woman sat in front of him. I yelled out to them as a warning to Dan to stay inside. They waved back. When they came close, the man yelled, “Hey, man, you been down those rapids?”

  “Not bad. Between a two and a three. Fun.”

  “Thanks. See ya.”

  And the woman waved her thanks, too.

  I pretended to fiddle with our motor until they were out of sight. I called to Dan. He came out. “It happens,” he said.

  “There’s the rifle. Where did you hide when I came down the cliff?”

  “There’s a cave just ’round the bend upriver.”

  “Wait there. Take the rifle.”

  I took off immediately up the path toward the top of the cliff. For the first couple of hundred yards or so, it was a smooth, steep wash, mostly in the shade of the cliff. But I couldn’t squeeze through the spout where the runoff had created the wash. It had been easy to drop onto the ledge on the way down, but lifting my way up took time. The limestone was gritty and flaky, and I kept falling back onto the wash. I felt like if I didn’t see them go over the rapids, I had to assume they were coming back toward us, maybe from on top. At last I wedged myself through and made it smoothly to the plateau. I cut across the bulge where the cliff juts out and the river bends and reached a spot above the rapids. A moment later, they came into view. The man guided the raft out of the current near to the rocks across the river from where I watched. They stayed there talking for a couple of minutes.

  I watched them and tried to force myself to consider just walking away. What was the mission? Dan left me often enough, usually in much this way: I’ll be back soon. He had come here believing it was safe, never thinking I’d show up. He wasn’t asking for my help. Yet by the Rules of Dan, he wanted me to stay: that is, he never asked me to stay or went on about how glad he was that I was going to help him; no blather about us sticking together forever; and, especially, no rosy future scenarios, which were always a reliable precursor to his disappearance. He hadn’t offered me any of the money. If he had, I’d have run, accelerating with each additional percentage point. By the Rules of Dan, we were still in the early stages of the enterprise. Betrayal would come in its own good time.

  The man pushed off and the current caught the raft and they hit the rapids. I walked back toward the path down the cliff. As I knew I would. The boat was empty. The cave was upriver around a slight bend. Before I got there, I called out to Dan. No answer. “They’re gone. Over the rapids.” No answer. I moved faster toward the cave opening. It wasn’t deep and Dan wasn’t there. I hit the cliff face with my fist and cursed myself for a fool.

  “Hey…up here.” I had to step back into the water to try to see him at the top of the cliff. The sun was behind him from that angle. I could see his shape but not his face. “I’ll head down. Take me a little while.”

  On the boat he said, “Ever think about your mother?”

  I did not think about her and certainly not there on that river. “I don’t remember her.”

  “I’m trying to figure out who you take after.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Not everybody would have come back today.”

  “She would have?”

  “No chance.” He did not laugh, though.

  Dan reflective was worse than Dan naked. I stared shamefully. But Dan had the charm and the ability to carry the moment as if nothing were odd. “Also, she was nasty and thought the worst of people. Beer. Want one? There’s a landing a few miles up the river where we can get more tomorrow or the next day.” He returned with two beers.

  “We should leave here,” I said.

  He sat down and scrutinized the cliffs for a while. He started to laugh. Just kept on. Then, “If we die from this, it’s due to cigarettes.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Neither do I. But plenty of Iraqis do. I was
over there working as a paving supervisor at the airport. Repairing the runways. Made a lot of friends, soldiers and civilians. One day, I’m talking things over with a young Iraqi, Tarik, about your age, very enterprising guy. He tells me he can make ‘tausands, tausands’ selling electronics. Cell phones, iPods, that kind of stuff. I wasn’t sure I could help him out with any of that, but then he mentioned cigarettes. The main fighting had stopped and the insurgency wasn’t in full force yet, but there were casualties all the time. Caskets flown in empty, flown out occupied. Ugly. But I suppose you’ve seen worse than I did.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  “One night I took a truckload of cigarettes to the central morgue where Tarik worked. Rough part of town it was, but Tarik told us how to get through. I left my partners watching the truck and went inside. Place was overwhelmed. No vacancies. Standing room only. And the stench as thick as fog on a swamp. I’m waiting for Tarik and I can’t help looking at the bodies. There’s so many that they’re stacked. Horrible and captivating at the same time. And it takes me a couple of minutes to realize that I recognize the second body from the top of the first stack in front of me. And he’s an American soldier. He had been anyway. He was in his thirties, dark-complected guy from Oklahoma. Santoro was his name. He’d died the day before from an IED on his way back to the airport. And I’m positive it’s Santoro because he thought I owed him money from a little deal we’d done. I’d been avoiding him for a couple of weeks. Tarik came out and we concluded our business. Unloaded those cigarettes in a garage just across from the morgue.

  “He paid up, no problems. Twenty thousand in very crisp green dollars. All good, best of friends, looking forward to doing more business, you know how it goes. And before I leave, I tell him he’s got an American body there in the Iraqi morgue. Suddenly, we’re not friends anymore. Tells me to take my money and forget about dead bodies.”

  “He’s selling bodies, too? Or buying them?”

  “Can’t be much money in that—too much supply. Where is he getting the crisp bills? And why doesn’t he like me recognizing Santoro? I knew there was a lot of money floating around, money that Saddam had stashed away, some of which had been found by soldiers. And there was money the military was throwing around. But I didn’t like this money so I gave it all to my partners. Told them it was down payment on the next deal and I let them think I was a sucker.”

  He smiled at me and held up his empty beer bottle. I came back with two more. The sun had slipped low enough for the shade to envelop the boat, but the light still hit the opposite rock wall, accentuating the striations and swirls of sandy colors. Dan was silent so long I thought he might be done with the story even though I could never remember him stopping midway through a story ever before. I knew better than to prompt him.

  At last he said, “If you want people to think you’re a sucker, you have to be aggressive, show them you think you’re brilliant. You can’t act naive. Remember that when you’re undercover.”

  “You told me that a long time ago.”

  “Did I?” He looked at me like he would have to be careful what he said to me because I might remember. For a moment, I wanted to think it was pride. But most likely, it just meant I fell into a certain category of people who had to be dealt with more carefully. He went on: “I had a job once selling cemetery plots. It was an easy job because if you run into the right type of people, they won’t let you leave without selling them. I quit because it wasn’t any fun. There was no challenge. For me it was like dealing with aliens. I never once in my life thought of buying a cemetery plot. One time a guy hesitated and I told him if he committed right then, I’d throw in a special tie to be buried in. He wrote the check. I quit. I never spent a minute thinking about death, but Santoro’s body stacked there bothered me all night. Why him? I knew he was listed as killed in action, which meant a body was going to be shipped home. Wouldn’t matter in any meaningful way whose body would be in the coffin in the ground in Oklahoma, but the why of it stuck in my mind. Next morning at work, a Captain Callahan calls me aside. ‘Saw you at the morgue last night,’ he says. ‘Stay away from there, or that’s where you’ll end up.’ He’s a tough guy, Third Infantry, means business. I made a comment and he slugged me and the next thing I know I’m in trouble for messing with a member of the military and they tell me I’m being transferred to Basra the next day.”

  “That was their mistake. They drew attention.”

  “Exactly. I left the supervisor’s hut and went straight to the back door of the building where the caskets were kept while waiting to be shipped home. There were only eleven that day, all marked. I opened Santoro’s. There’s a body bag and there’s somebody in it. I had to know who. I unzipped that bag.”

  “And here we are.”

  “Wrapped in plastic, clean and neat and new stacks of hundred-dollar bills. I knew what I was going to do even before I put the lid back on. Luckily, I got sick in Basra, a little nothing but it got me fired and sent home. Before I left, I managed to get two hundred cell phones for Tarik. Stayed up all night damaging the innards of as many of them as I could.”

  “That isn’t like you.”

  “Surprised me, too. You’re never too old to learn about yourself, I guess. Within a month, I had a job at the cemetery where Santoro’s body was not buried.”

  He stopped for a few minutes again. Night was coming and the breeze swirled up the canyon, fighting the water and making it work. I was hungry, but I did not want to move, not even to reach for my beer.

  “I made a mistake,” he said. “Same mistake twice. Want to guess?”

  I knew what the mistake was and I was surprised he made it, but I couldn’t imagine that he wanted to hear me guess right.

  “Twice isn’t bad.”

  “Gets you killed in the war. I opened that coffin twice, once in Baghdad and once when I dug it up, and either time I could have taken a share and gone away happy and no one would have ever bothered me about it. But looking at all that money, I just stopped thinking. I didn’t even know how much. Hell, I still don’t know how much there is.”

  “Twenty-five million is the number they mentioned.”

  “I never counted it and I never questioned that I would take it all.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to try to give it back to them?”

  “Why lie? I’d do the same thing a hundred times. No way I can look at that money and not try to figure a way to have it all. Let’s eat.”

  I started a fire with driftwood, which was plentiful. Dan was always eager to cook. I watched him fillet the bass. He liked to show off and offered no instruction. He used olive oil, pepper and salt, oregano, and just a little bit of curry powder. He opened a can of black beans and seasoned those a bit, too. We ate on the top deck under the slight sliver of moon and enough stars to make me feel like nothing and no one in the universe would take notice of Dan or me. Dan smoothed the blanket with reminiscences from days before I could remember. I had run away and hidden in the root cellar. Dan found me, but I was too stubborn or proud or angry to come out, so he brought dinner down there and a sleeping bag. A few nights later, he had guests for dinner, business, of course. He forgot to bring food to the cellar and I walked in looking like I was being raised by wolves and just as angry and indignant. Dan couldn’t resist: he tossed a couple of rolls and ordered me out.

  Before he went to sleep, he told me that his brother Hal was an all right guy and would help me if I ever got into a jam, even though his wife was a horrible witch.

  As he was going down the stairs, I had to ask him, “Why didn’t you spend the money?”

  He said, “I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll figure that out.”

  I sat up for a long time, listening to the sloshing river and the breeze, watching for shooting stars, and trying to shake it all off so I could figure out what I was doing there and how I was going to stop doing it. The coyote took the night off. A light caught my eye. A bright star ri
sing in the west. It got bigger and brighter and then disappeared. Within seconds, the whoosh of helicopter blades could be heard. Dan heard them, too.

  9.

  It seemed the helicopter was hovering downstream for a while, but it was low and I couldn’t see it. Dan said, “Let’s get the raft.”

  “Look.”

  Two rafts could be seen coming around the bend from upriver. We started out for our raft. One shot rang out. We hit the deck. But they weren’t shooting at us. They hit the raft.

  “Start the engine,” I said. Dan went to the helm. I threw off the tie lines. I picked up the rifle and fired a few times toward the oncoming rafts. They didn’t return fire, not wanting to kill Dan, but I knelt down anyway. The boat started to move, but the rafts were coming on fast. I could hear the motors now. I fired more and must have hit one guy; he fell into the river. We were out in midstream, picking up speed, and the rafts paced us. We rounded the first bend, still about a mile from the rapids. I went forward to Dan at the helm. “I don’t think they’ll catch us before the rapids,” I said.

  “Have any advice on how to take this thing over?”

  “Don’t think it matters.”

  The darkness seemed as deep as an ocean. The wind was proof we were moving, but the rock walls were so obscure they seemed uniform. The river was an elevator and we knew the cable was going to break soon. All at once, the walls seemed closer. The wind blew stronger against us. And the churning sound of the rapids drowned out the engine. Behind us, the rafts had pulled closer, hovering nearby like scavengers. The screech of a pontoon scraping a boulder froze us before we were rocked to the left then spun so we were bumping sideways. Dan fell away from the helm into the wall and I hopped over him, then righted myself.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “Where are they?”

  I looked behind: the rafts had stopped before the rapids. But they weren’t receding. “We’ve stopped,” I said. “They’re hovering behind us.” I looked forward, straining against the sheath of black. I could see tufts of white where the water rose and slapped. Dan grabbed the helm and gunned the engine. We swayed a little, but we didn’t straighten out. Toward the left shore, I saw an outline, a low strip stretching from the rock wall. Three flares arced from the helicopter for three seconds before they ignited the river and cliffs with the cold light that always signals hell opening up. Flares mean death and destruction to me, either the before or the aftermath. The usual strobe whooshing of the copter blades made it seem as if the light flickered. But it didn’t. The light was, as always, mean and hard.