Table of Contents
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Six Months Later
Afterword
About Roy Chandler
Books by Roy Chandler
The Making of Blackwater Jack copyright © 2014 by Katherine R. Chandler.
All rights reserved.
Publication History
ebook: 2014
Katherine R. Chandler, Publisher
St. Mary’s City, Maryland
This is a work of fiction. None of the characters represent any persons living or dead.
All characters and incidents depicted were created by the author.
Dedication
Two of my extremely few friends drove me to start and to finish this book, and I dedicate this volume to them:
William Smart of Whitehall, Montana and
Michael Maloney (the real one, not the character in this book) of Montross, Virginia.
I am old, and enthusiasm comes harder. It has been my wish to retire from professional writing. Yet, the friends mentioned above have shown no mercy and their never-easing insistence encouraged (forced) me to work, to write, to create—one last time.
Do I thank them or feed them glass? You the reader will decide. Of course, I hope you like Blackwater Jack. I confess that I do, but if the story falls short of your expectations, please blame the two named above. They are responsible—period!
Rocky Chandler, author
This is not a story of suspense.
This is a story of action.
Book One—The Boy
1
The odds are that few have ever known an assassin, and that most would be repelled by Tim Carlisle’s intention to become just that—a killer.
But, sometimes villains need eliminating, and for those who can accomplish the tasks, legalities should not matter. Examples of worthy villains abound from the most obvious like Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler to the almost nameless guy down the street who beats the living hell out of everyone in his family and no one chooses or dares to do anything about it.
Timothy Carlisle was no vigilante righting wrongs for the sake of justice, he did not wear a cape or a mask, and he was pretty well convinced that Robin Hood had not existed—at least not as a helper of the poor. Carlisle intended to blot out an evil bastard who, not incidentally, was responsible for his right foot being blown off.
There are bad guys everywhere, and it is true that the Colonel had, among other evil things, become a sort of criminal king pin, but Carlisle’s primary points were that the Colonel got good men killed, and he kept stinging Tim Carlisle personally.
Colonel Frank J. Saltz suspected former Corporal Timothy Carlisle of … ? Well, he was right, but that was an ancient story and merely began Tim’s hunger to plant the Colonel deeply and permanently.
Recently retired, Colonel F. J. Saltz, operated his “Evil Empire” well within Tim’s geographical sphere, and that also counted against him more than a little.
Tim’s was a rural Pennsylvania county where most knew each other and had for many generations. However, local individuals and families had been financially sucked dry, and honor and dignity as well as wealth had been stolen by Saltz’s contemptible operations.
Local people’s lives had been and were still being ruined. Reputations, livelihoods, and life savings had gone under. The Colonel caused the misery, and he uncaringly prospered from it.
That sort of criminality happens regularly in urban areas but only rarely within ordinary rural societies.
What can anyone, any ordinary person, do? Turn to the law? Improbable. Monsters like the Colonel are the law or they have operatives too clever to be caught by it. The Colonel and those like him, stomp ahead, threatening, betraying, profiteering, becoming ever more prominent and sometimes disgustingly popular. Men like the Colonel do as they wish while appearing untouchable—until all that they stand for becomes unendurable, and eventually someone needs to put a stop to it.
In the Colonel’s case, Tim Carlisle chose to volunteer.
Still, too-common criminalities sound a bit mundane to require putting a bullet through another American—especially a former US Army field grade officer and an alleged hero of our Middle East wars.
To understand, perhaps even appreciate, why retired Colonel Saltz needed to be checked off the alive-and-well list requires turning back the clock a few years.
Those few years ago:
Gabe, Tim Carlisle’s slightly older friend, did his best to keep the younger man in college until he gained a basic Bachelor’s Degree in something—in anything—was Carlisle’s parents’ frequently spoken hope.
Tim’s major difficulty was the common affliction of suffering through flat-out boring classes—in his opinion, worse than anything else he could think of.
Just lasting through high school had been trying. Four years of college had appeared, and were proving to be, stultifying.
A second deterrent to “butt-sitting” in classrooms, was that Tim’s uncle, Old Dog Carlisle, had left his nephew his worldly wealth, and Old Dog, an alleged biker bum, had accumulated a tidy fortune.
Adam Carlisle, Old Dog to most, had wagered most of what he came by on the never-defeated heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano’s every professional fight, in total, forty-nine winning bouts. Undefeated was the key word. Uncle Dog never lost a cent betting on The Rock, and he made a bundle. A large and significant bundle.
It was wealth that Old Dog didn’t personally give two hoots in hell about. Uncle Dog was an old school biker. He didn’t just talk about it; Old Dog Carlisle rode the miles and hung with brother riders. Bikers from everywhere knew him because he really had lived on his bike, as had they.
Dog did not need much money, but that did not mean that he ignored its value. He cared in large part because he wished to leave his only nephew a measurable legacy. And, when Tim’s time came, the youth was glad to get it!
Back in the early 1970s, the outwardly wild-living biker, took some of his Marciano money and bought cheap waterfront lots in Florida. Those lots ballooned in value, and he sold for big money shortly before his death. Tim inherited that lode as well.
Tim Carlisle’s legacy lay idle during his high school years until his friend Gabe recommended putting the many bucks in the hands of his lawyer, who was busily and profitably multiplying Gabe’s inheritance.
Despite his parents’ conservative admonitions, Tim agreed, and in the boom years of the early 2000s, attorney Dan Grouse, made both youths small-time millionaires.
The steadily increasing fortune was barely imaginable to a boy, but it was an exhilarating fact. Unless he was foolish, Tim Carlisle would never have to work. Recognition of such a condition can be dangerous, and it can turn a decent youth into a decadent bum.
Tim Carlisle’s pal, Gabe, was four years older. When they were kids that age separation made a huge difference. As grown men it was as nothing.
Tim owed Gabe for giving him solid advice in investments and education, but he still liked anything he could imagine better than he did enduring college.
Tim Carlisle managed only three
and half college years. So what? He could go back for a last term later, if and when he chose.
As guys do, Tim called his friend Gabe because that nickname mildly irritated his buddy. Gabe fit all right because his friend’s given name was Gabriel, but everyone else knew him as Shooter.
Trust this—Shooter Galloway deserved his nickname. Gabriel Galloway was one hard hombre. In the home county where, despite loud threats, nobody hardly ever shot anybody, Shooter Galloway put down three bad guys, and most figure he did two others.
There was nothing illegal or in any way questionable in those known shootings. A mean-assed family had come after him, and Shooter dropped them.
The pair of possibles? Same family, but facts stayed hidden, and nobody knew for sure.
Gabe Galloway also shot a lot in both the Marine Corps and the US Army while serving in the Middle East. Now Shooter had a job with a mysterious sort of company, and he carried a gun all of the time.
Tim envied that need to carry, and he saw Gabriel Galloway’s activities as just about exemplary. Shooter hinted that, if Tim finished college and met a few other barely-described standards, he might someday be considered for Shooter’s mostly unidentified occupation.
Timothy Carlisle lived in New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania on Cold Storage Road almost beside the defunct Thebes business offices, where the Carlisle family had lived for generations.
Like Shooter Galloway, Tim had earned a nickname that he had come to prefer. In circles he valued, most called him Blackwater Jack.
Training the contractors who provided personal protection to most of the dignitaries during the Iraq war’s heavy fighting, Blackwater Training Center’s record was perfect during those hard years. Even through the worst of it, they never had a VIP injured, much less killed or kidnapped. Their private air force provided support for many Army and Marine Corps units doing without, but gentler souls (politicians back in Washington mostly) took exception to Blackwater’s unpublished and unofficial policy that, “If you shoot at us, we will shoot you,” and forced the company to close.
Tim Carlisle took the courses then helped train and retrain some topnotch Blackwater fighting men who did one hell of a job “Over there.” Tim was proud of that service, and Blackwater was where he too became a seriously deadly shooter. That training he liked to talk about.
When Tim was hired at Blackwater a former SEAL owned the place. Tim labored at tasks ranging from dog robber to sniper instructor under N.A. Rock, who led the Blackwater sniper training program.
That was how Tim Carlisle got to know Rock and his topnotch team of sniper instructors—men whose names still ring among those who practice the sniper trade, hard and special instructors like Tim Cameron, Jack McMillin, and Odel Wood.
At Blackwater, he learned about and used Rock’s super accurate rifles. When it became his turn to shoot in the Middle East, Tim knew how to handle his rifle beyond most men’s abilities.
The training center’s owner moved to Dubai lest he be charged with trumped-up irregularities he (and all the rest involved) saw as performing their duties and to establish new and imaginative services.
To understand how all of this tied together, it will be best to go back, nearly to the beginning, back to when Old Dog had been dead only a few years, and Tim Carlisle was getting himself ready to go out on the road and do some one-percenter kind of Easyrider motorcycling, the kind of life Uncle Old Dog had lived and loved—adventuring that Tim figured he had already put off too long.
Even in condensed form, it is—interesting.
2
The Beginning
Late 1990s
Tim Carlisle lay on his pressing bench studying the Harley-Davidson shovelhead motorcycle hanging from the barn’s ridgepole. The big-twin had hung there since Old Dog’s death years ago.
Uncle Dog’s deal with his nephew had been that the Harley would not be lowered until Tim’s parents approved. Tim had ridden crotch rocket type motorcycles to destruction on the paths and trails of Dynamite Hill during his high school years, but the Harley-Davidson riding permission had been withheld until Tim graduated from West Perry High School. By then, Tim Carlisle had established his own standards for lowering and riding Uncle Dog’s beloved motorcycle.
Old Dog had encouraged his nephew to workout, to develop himself, and to gain physical skills that could be measured. Through his growing years, Tim had respected his uncle’s desires, and although Old Dog lay in his eternal sleep above a creek in distant Alaska, his nephew kept working at it.
High school sports came and went. Tim Carlisle played whatever was in season. He made varsity teams and knew what it felt like to score touchdowns and hit home runs.
At least as important, Tim lifted weights, punched both heavy and speed bags, and shot a lot of baskets. He took those workouts on his barn floor, and when he lay on his pressing bench he stared into the barn peak where Old Dog’s shovelhead motorcycle dangled from the ridgepole.
On a day when he struggled to bench press two hundred pounds, Tim vowed that as much as he longed to ride the Harley, he would hold off until he could bench a clean and honest, chest to elbows-locked three hundred pounds.
He would dedicate the training and effort involved to Old Dog’s memory.
The years of disciplined labor and measurable success, he figured, would prove him worthy to ride his uncle’s beloved machine.
That accomplishment came slowly and college interfered, but finally the day had come. Today, with his friend Gabe Galloway spotting, he intended to bench-press three hundred pounds of York barbell in perfect form.
Gabriel Galloway was not so certain. “Damn, that’s a lot of weight, Tim.”
“I’m ready. I’m going to shove these plates clean through the barn roof.”
“All right, Mister America. Go for it, but I’m the only spotter here to pry the bar off your flattened out chest. So, if it gets too hard, quit early.”
Tim Carlisle rarely had spotters standing ready to help balance a tottering weight or to assist when muscle and sinew tired more than expected. So, he had been unwilling to attempt his big lift—until now.
Tim settled himself and gripped the bar solidly, hands at shoulder width. He had never successfully pressed more than 275 pounds, but he had trained for this lift. He felt strong and ready, and he really had prepared.
His special prep had been to suspend his barbell in slings that positioned the bar more than halfway through a bench press. Then he slid big plates onto the bar. Accomplishing those half-presses, that lifters called lockups because the goal was to lock the elbows straight, Tim had raised three hundred and thirty pounds. He had, in fact, done three repetitions at that monstrous weight.
With a month of those heavy workouts behind, Tim felt the three hundred pound press might seem easy. Well, maybe not easy, but certainly possible.
Gabriel Galloway believed Tim Carlisle would lift his three hundred pounds. Shooter thought that his young friend could accomplish about anything he chose to do. The problem had often been that in other things, Tim Carlisle simply did not seem to enjoy the tasks required to succeed in life.
College was the perfect example. Tim had no difficulty with his classes. He slid through with a mixture of As and Bs, occasionally with a C. He had received two Fs, both because he had announced—to the entire class—that the professor up front didn’t know what he was talking about and had walked out. He retook the courses with another professor and aced them both. Then he had dropped out of school before his spring and final semester began.
Galloway believed Tim Carlisle needed an enlistment in either the Marine Corps or the United States Army—in the infantry, of course, to mature him, to gain worldly experience among disciplined men, and to give him direction in life. That was how Galloway had done it, and Shooter recognized the values of such service.
Now Tim was obsessed with bench-pressing three hundred pounds, which, Shooter expected, would be followed by Tim’s departure on Old Dog’s motorcycle to test for
months or perhaps longer his uncle’s life as a nomadic biker.
Galloway had no empathy with his friend’s hunger to ride in the wind, but perhaps Tim Carlisle needed to get that unshared dream behind him before he could settle into becoming something less shiftless and far more commendable. Galloway got himself set to lend his own whippy strength to controlling the heavy barbell, if his friend found himself faltering.
Tim unfocused his eyes, and sucked in a decent breath. He would exhale as he lifted, thereby easing pressure on his blood system. His muscles tensed, and he concentrated all of his strength into moving the massive weight. He lowered the barbell from its hooks and felt it touch his chest. Lord, but it was heavy. He did not wait. Up—he heaved all of his power into the lift.
For a short instant nothing moved. Tim felt strain in his shoulder joints, and he poured all he had into straightening his arms. The barbell began a slow but controlled rise.
Getting the iron mass into motion was the hard part. Each inch he gained improved the mechanical advantage of his bent arms. Air blew from his lungs, and the barbell rose more swiftly. He heard Gabe Galloway’s shouted encouragement and felt himself shudder past the last sticking point an instant before his elbows locked solidly.
The barbell was lifted, and having done it once, Tim Carlisle felt confidence flare and awareness blossomed that he could do more.
He sucked in air, lowered the bar to his chest, and tried again. The bar moved, and Tim’s entire body shook and vibrated from the strain, but he swooshed air and his elbows again locked.
One more? Impossible—but he chose to try. If he could manage three reps he would know he had won. He would … now his uncontrolled breathing sawed. There was shimmering in his upper arms and his tendons seemed stretched to their utmost. His eyesight was blurring. Still, the great weight rose. He would make it.
Then everything froze. He arched his back struggling for the last few inches, but nothing moved. Tim Carlisle reached deep into reserves he had not known he possessed. He managed a small suck of air. He focused on the overhead barn beams and pushed with all that he had left. One arm locked, but the other, his weaker arm, resisted for an interminable moment before finally squishing into position.
The Making of Blackwater Jack Page 1