In twenty minutes Edward was unlocking the front door to the run-down terrace house in Redfern that was his temporary home. It was ‘furnished’, according to the realtor, but everything in the place was ratty, worn out, cheap and very, very nasty. It had been student digs for a long time, and clearly the owners had never spent a red cent on it. There was a damp, rancid smell, too, and an undercurrent of something infinitely worse – like faeces or the decomposing body of a dog under the rotten floorboards. This was a putrid whiff that came and went at different times. The toilet and bathroom were disgusting. No telephone. Because of the fucking Olympics, they were getting a grand per week for this rat-hole that needed a jerry-can of gas and a lighted match thrown in it – a thousand fucking bucks! Christ. With the bond and a month in advance, that came to eight thousand dollars. On top of which he’d had to buy tickets for the Olympics, which cost a small fortune. Christ, he’d only been in the goddamned country three days, and he’d already split with the best part of twenty grand. Still, he was lucky to have a roof over him at all. Everything remotely decent had been snapped up long ago, and by the time Edward had made his plans to come to Sydney, there were only a few hovels or trailers out in the boondocks for rent left. Not a problem. Jesus, he’d slept in a mosquito-infested ditch in Nicaragua, woken up with the biggest leeches he’d ever seen clinging to his genitalia and burnt them all off with a lighted cigarette. That was the fucking pits. Before that, in Laos, he’d once spent the night perched in a fucking treetop with a never-ending soundtrack of monkey and bat screams to keep him awake. If that didn’t drive him troppo, nothing would. So, when you put it in perspective, this joint was almost palatial. At least he didn’t have to deal with warring Montagnards carrying spears tipped with a poison so lethal it paralysed you, shutting down your windpipe and killing you in ten seconds flat. In any case he wouldn’t be in it for long, and there was the incentive of a hefty – and long overdue – payday when he hit Stateside again. And by the living Christ, was he owed.
Edward removed his cap and shades, lit up a Camel and lay on the bed. It was a cheap, foam-rubber mattress that sagged deeply in the middle. On the blankets there were ancient stains and cigarette burn marks. Bad as it was, in a way it suited him to be holed up in such a low dive. The denizens around here were all riff-raff – no-account blacks who sat outside sucking hooch and screaming at each other all day, indolent pre-teenagers on skateboards, loiterers, young women dragging the shopping home on foot. Domestic shouting matches and wailing children could be heard through the party walls into the night. Clearly, this was the Harlem of Sydney. Nearly all the houses in the street had graffiti sprayed over them, and every other car was a wreck; there were discarded needles, empty booze bottles and all kinds of crap lying around. He was among the rejects, the oppressed and unloved. The police, it seemed, treated it as a no-go zone: so far he hadn’t noticed much of a cop presence – just the occasional pair of uniforms wandering around, trying not to notice anything. It was a perfect cover, the last place you would expect to find a button man on his way to picking up a cool million for an international hit.
That evening Edward ate at a Greek restaurant he’d discovered around the corner. It too was a nondescript place, a hole in the wall, but it was convenient and the food was cheap and good, surprisingly so given the squalid back-street location. A table of chain-smoking, coffee-drinking Greeks occupied the rear section, gabbling incessantly in their own lingo. There was no written menu – the owner/chef simply brought a succession of dishes to the table, from the standard caviar and tzatziki dips, stuffed vine leaves and marinated octopus through to grilled swordfish, salad, Turkish delight and Greek coffee to finish off. It was called The Kalamata, and on the wall was a large oil painting depicting that part of the country – row upon row of olive trees being harvested under a shimmering blue sky. It was, apparently, where the owner came from. His name was Alex, and Alex was an energetic and most accommodating host. He would even read your future from your coffee grounds after the meal. On Edward’s first visit, Alex had spent half an hour examining the brown sludge at the bottom of his cup, turning it this way and that, tapping it, alternately smiling and knitting his brows in a deep, thoughtful frown. In the end, he’d solemnly pronounced that Edward would face ‘great difficulties, extreme difficulties’ soon, but that he would overcome them and end up rich and happy, and live a long life. What a charlatan the man was.
A lot of people would place a good deal of store with this kind of flim-flam, but not Edward Hickey. He was a materialist; his beliefs were restricted to what his senses could detect. Which meant, of course, that he did not believe in God, or hold with the concept of a superior power. Nor did he believe in an afterlife. How could he, given his experiences? Religion was a worldwide racket, same as arms or drugs, and a massively profitable one. Evangelism especially played on a big scale, always had, and nowadays Armageddon-type fundamentalist cults had mushroomed throughout the United States and elsewhere. And because the leaders of such churches relied heavily on the irrational fears and insecurities in the hearts of the average schmuck, the window of opportunity was vast – vast enough for the Khormitch outfit to shell out a million in cash to settle the score over a terminally mind-fucked, out-of-control son and heir.
In Edward’s opinion, Carter Khormitch IV had deserved a lot worse than he’d got. If he’d been serious – if he’d had any guts – he would have gone down in a hail of bullets and thereby fast-tracked himself clear to the Pearly Gates. At the end of a long and dusty drive in his rented pick-up to the Citadel, Edward had been treated guardedly by Khormitch – until he’d learned something of Edward’s history. After that he’d embraced him like a brother. In Khormitch’s view they were both victims of the treacherous Reagan administration, so it was fitting Edward should be awarded the contract. They had been, in Khormitch’s words, used and spat out by a system that had no use for men of conscience. George Bush he had time for, since Bush had at least been a fighter pilot in World War II, but Ronald Reagan was ‘an evil clown.’ Seed of God was just like the military in some ways, which was hardly surprising given Khormitch Senior’s background. It was all about shaping hearts and minds, training receptive, suggestible individuals to absorb and believe in everything you taught by putting the fear of Christ into them. It was about creating an army consisting of loyal, disciplined troops – men and women of conscience – from scratch, with only the raw material of human clay at your disposal. Which was exactly the job specification for a drill sergeant at Fort Bragg.
Edward had some fond memories of Fort Bragg. As a naive eighteen-year-old from Concord, New Hampshire, he had withstood everything they had thrown at him while others, much louder and tougher-looking than he, had cried for their mothers in their bunks at night and then quietly packed their bags after the two-week probationary period. During that horrific time, Edward did not believe he would live through it, let alone graduate near the top of his class. But then one day it had dawned on him that the physical and psychological punishment, the ceaseless torture, abuse, humiliation – the whole shitty business – could be coped with in your head. You only had to separate your mental from your physical self. It was the most important lesson he ever learned. Once you grasped it, nothing could hurt you – or if it did, the pain simply didn’t matter.
He’d made it to Saigon several months before that unseemly evacuation from the roof of the embassy building in May 1975. Disappointing, but still, it was a blooding of sorts, an introduction to war – and to the CIA. For the last part of his tour there, Edward was assigned guard duties, protecting diplomatic staff from the increasingly frightening surge of Viet Cong power in the streets. From a bunker of sandbags erected behind the high steel gates, he’d helped repulse sporadic small-arms attacks, knowing that any day – or night – columns of tanks would come crashing through those gates and into the compound.
During those hectic last days, he’d killed his first man, then his second and third. They’d kept com
ing at him and he’d shot them. Viet Cong seemed to present themselves to be shot, like sacrificial Zulu warriors, as if to count the enemy’s guns. He might not have shown it, but Edward – along with every other serviceman present – was wetting his pants waiting for D-Day to happen, wondering if he would have time to get out. On his hundredth day in-country, he’d been one of the last men to scramble into the last chopper, hauled up by comrades as AK-47 tracer rounds had snapped around him in the night air.
Edward must have done a good deal right during that truncated tour, because he was then promoted and posted to Laos to help stem the communist tide there – but it was too little, too late. Back in the States two years later, a seasoned soldier with three stripes on his sleeve, he was wooed and eventually recruited by a man named Milo Caspar, who was a middle-ranking CIA officer. Damned good name for a spook, Edward thought. Caspar told him America had no further interest in South-East Asia – that war had been a royal fuck-up from day one – but there were new dangers emerging much closer to home.
All of Central America had been in a state of turmoil for years, much of it American generated and funded. Caspar had offered him a specialist training job, and since he was a warrior without a war, Edward had jumped at it before he was fully aware of what it entailed. Even in hindsight, however, and in spite of everything, he would not change one little thing. His mission had been to travel to Nicaragua, set up a secret camp in the wilderness and train local primitives to become efficient guerrilla fighters, known as Contras. During this time, Nicaragua was governed by a democratically elected left-wing government – the Sandanistas – and Washington wasn’t in the mood to suffer a communist regime right at its doorstep. Cuba was bad enough. The Sandanistas had to be overthrown, and that meant US aid of the covert kind. Not troops on the ground, but arms and training. The peons from the bush had to be given guns and shown how to use them without blowing their feet off, but more than that, they had to develop a fighting spirit, a belief in their cause. The idea was to attack soft targets such as schools, hospitals and churches, assassinate prominent left-wing individuals, make it impossible for the Sandanistas to govern effectively, cause the peons to become disaffected and thus pave the way for the contras to take over. The CIA master plan also involved recruiting the infamous death squads from Argentina, under the auspices of General Galtieri himself. Inside a week, Edward and five other hand-picked mercenaries had been given cash, false passports and other documents, and were strapped aboard a C-123 cargo plane en route to the Nicaraguan badlands. They had called themselves the Dirty Half Dozen, and the tag had stuck.
In this unofficial type of war, there was no Geneva Convention, no code of conduct. There were no rules of engagement other than to kill the enemy by any means available. A rag-tag army of pig-ignorant contras was soon whipped into shape, shown how to use rockets, mortars and sophisticated weapons, taught to hunt and kill by night and to take no prisoners. They’d marauded through villages and towns, shot people randomly in the streets, blown up and razed buildings, and then withdrawn back to their jungle stronghold, which was very effectively concealed from the air by a canopy of leaves on cargo netting. They’d broken into churches during services and massacred worshippers with fragmentation grenades and machine-guns. They’d slaughtered children in schoolyards. They’d cut the heads and hands off victims and sent them to their families. CIA funds, laundered from the sale of arms to Iran, continued to pour in. Once during a small arms training session, Edward had been accidentally shot through the shoulder by one of his own men, and then a crate of ammunition had fallen onto his head from a cargo net being lowered by a chopper, crushing his cheekbone and damaging his eye. He’d been out of action for several weeks after that. In the meantime, rivers of red flowed through Nicaragua. The Argentine death squads were systematically eliminating teachers, writers, politicians, priests, anyone who mattered. Thousands of people disappeared forever. On one occasion, Caspar had paid Edward fifty thousand dollars to arrange for the assassination of a troublesome newspaper editor. For him, killing was nothing special – no more special than taking his morning crap. He’d become so good at it, he was code-named Agent Paragon. Milo Caspar was very pleased with him.
As Agent Paragon, Edward discovered he was in his natural element, holed up in the jungle training terrorists, living off the land. Then for the first time, love had entered his life when he began an intense affair with a young Nicaraguan woman named Olivet. She was wiry, dirty, almost urchin-like, but she exuded a crude sexual enthusiasm that had thrilled Edward to distraction. Olivet spoke little English, and Edward’s Spanish wasn’t much better, but it didn’t matter. His practice was to drive his Jeep to a pre-arranged spot – not far from the village where she lived with her extended family – lay a plastic groundsheet, and they would strip off and fornicate for hours on the steaming mulch of the jungle floor. Knowing how poor she was, he’d sometimes paid Olivet – ten or twenty dollars in US currency, which was like gold – and in this way encouraged her to keep on coming back. Olivet had clung to him, perhaps seeing him as a meal ticket, but Edward didn’t care: he was besotted with his reedy, wicked little Nicaraguan whore.
Everything was fine in the world of Agent Paragon. That was, until the story had broken – until the world was told all about Reagan’s so-called ‘dirty war’ against the Sandanistas. People began running for cover then. White House and CIA denials abounded as events began to unravel. Then the whole arms-for-hostages arrangement became public, and the US government was under siege from all directions. Shredders ran hot as government officials and CIA agents covered their backs and searched for scapegoats. One night, three contra soldiers had tried to sneak into Edward’s base camp, but they hadn’t counted on the tripwire and were blown up. Edward and his men had cut off their heads and hands and sent them to their families. Edward was so incensed, he’d cut out the officer’s heart as well and sent it to his mother. Clearly things were getting out of hand. Soon afterwards, Milo Caspar ordered the Dirty Half Dozen to disband and return to the States, but Edward was deeply suspicious. Who were the dogs who’d tried to kill him, if not Caspar’s agents? Also, Olivet was carrying his child, and he didn’t want to desert her. He’d decided to go to ground and place his faith in no-one. His five comrades, however, had had enough and agreed to go home. They were picked up at a covert jungle airstrip by an Air America cargo plane flying from Bogota, Colombia, to Miami – a CIA milk run. But the plane had mysteriously crashed, killing everyone aboard. There was talk that a surface-to-air missile had brought it down, but nothing was ever proved. In press reports, there was no mention of anyone on board apart from the crew. Except for Edward, the Dirty Half Dozen had been written out of history. Officially they’d never existed.
When he finally did make his way back home, the army didn’t want to know him, and nor did the CIA. Phone calls to Caspar were never returned. Then he’d found out there was a price on his head. He changed his name to Duane J. Knightly, moved around, worked at various roughneck occupations: laying oil pipelines in New Mexico, heavy construction, logging in the Pacific North-West. These were the types of hard-hat jobs where they paid cash in hand and asked no questions. Eventually he’d drifted into Canada. While in Vancouver, he’d done a contract hit for a man who wanted to get rid of his business partner, who’d been fleecing the company’s accounts. For this, Edward was paid fifteen grand. Word of mouth got around, he did another hit – this time in Calgary – and the man known as Duane J. Knightly, formerly Agent Paragon, was back in the killing game. The difference was, this time he was writing the rules. In the Calgary hit, he’d ‘bowling-balled’ the victim, making him kneel before putting three shots in a tight group into the back of his head. Then, to prevent identification, he’d cut off the victim’s head and hands – a skill that came as easily as ever with the help of a sharp knife and a cleaver. He’d buried the parts in a field, then thrown the rest of the corpse into a flooded quarry. Nothing about it had appeared in the papers – th
e victim would go down as one more missing person on police files.
After that Edward had moved on to Seattle, the home of the Green River Killer, where he’d lived on and off for a few years. Because he was a loner, unencumbered by wife and offspring, he could go anywhere on a whim or at a minute’s notice if things felt wrong. Then one fine day, he’d been interviewed in relation to the Green River matter, but the police had assured him afterwards he was not a suspect, that in their hunt for the killer they had routinely interviewed hundreds of people. The fact that he lived alone was the reason they had shown interest in him, nothing more. After all, the murders had been going on long before Edward arrived in town. But it had sent him a warning signal, so he quit Seattle and moved to Phoenix, where he rented a run-down clapboard house on the outskirts. While living there he picked up a casual girlfriend, who was a white-trash itinerant like him. One morning he’d found her going through his personal things, and he’d dragged her out of the room and punched her so hard she’d snapped her neck clean in half when she’d crashed through the banister and hit the floor downstairs. He’d buried her in the woods, breaking his back and aggravating the old shoulder wound for half the night trying to dig up the frozen ground. By the time he had a deep enough hole, the corpse itself was stiff with ice and he’d had to smash its legs with the shovel to fit it in.
Hard Yards Page 13