Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  Barzai turned his piercing gaze on the Mullah, and then he glared at the others. “I agree. This is why I want to be certain that word of this will not go outside of this room. This matter is between the four of us, and if you wish to continue in your present posts, make certain it remains that way.”

  They all nodded their agreement, and they all wondered how they could use the information to their advantage. Or to the disadvantage of their opponents, which meant everyone in this room, apart from themselves.

  “One more matter, General Kadim. Make certain you remember your prime assignment.”

  Kadim, puzzled, turned back to Barzai. “Sir?”

  “You have a simple question to resolve, General. I trust you make it your number one priority. Where is Mullah Omar?”

  * * *

  When I woke up with a splitting headache, I wondered what had happened the day before, and then I remembered. The telephone was ringing, and I went into the living room of my tiny apartment to answer it. Rachel was sprawled on the couch, fully dressed, starting to come to.

  I snatched up the receiver, “Hoffman.”

  While I waited for the other party to speak, I looked around my tiny abode. I kept a tiny apartment in the center of Peshawar’s red-light district, which sure made for an interesting life. But rents weren’t cheap, and this was all I could afford. The paint was faded, the furniture needed replacing and the carpets were showing their age, with the occasional bald patch poorly disguised by a small table or a planter. It would have been depressing, except that I spent little time here, and when I did come home, I only had to tumble out of the door to find plenty of entertainment. I had another rat hole of an apartment in Kandahar, which was our main center of operations.

  The caller finally spoke. “My name is Walker. You brought me in from Vietnam yesterday.”

  I remembered him, the spook from the CIA. “Yes, Mr. Walker. I thought you were flying into Afghanistan.”

  “So did I, but we hit problems, and I’m still in Peshawar. I wondered if you would consider a short term contract to help me out.”

  I laughed out loud. Rachel sat up and groaned, then looked at me, her eyebrows raised. “The question is academic, Mr. Walker. My airline has gone bust. You’ll have to find someone else. Good day to you.”

  “Wait a moment. I may be able to do something about that,” he said quickly, just as I was about to hang up. I laughed again.

  “I doubt it. The debt is pretty heavy. For your information, Mr. Walker, it’s more than half a million dollars. No short term contract would cover that amount of money.”

  “This one would.”

  Rachel was on her feet now, wincing as the weight came on her injured leg. She’d caught the gist of the conversation. I was about to get rid of the man when she grabbed the receiver from me. She held me off with one arm while she spoke to Walker.

  “Ok, buddy, what’s on offer?”

  I pushed the button for speakerphone so that I could hear.

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  “Rachel Beckett, I’m the co-pilot who flew you back from Vietnam yesterday.”

  I was listening now, holding my ear close to the receiver. Our heads touched, and I smelled the delicious odor of her, a combination of last night’s fragrance and the succulent aroma of musk. I fought down my desire for her and tried to hear what was being said.

  “Are you empowered to discuss business on behalf of Helene Air?”

  “I am,” she replied firmly. “Fire away, buddy. What are you offering?”

  “The company I work for may be prepared to pick up your mortgage. We would then lease back the assets to you, and you can repay us by way of agreed monthly installments which would be covered by work you carry out for us.”

  I could see her calculating percentages in her brain. “That’s very generous of you, Mr. Walker.”

  “Yes, it is. So what do you say? Do you want your airline back?”

  I was shaking my head. I wanted no part of it, no part of their vicious and mostly illegal operations. I’d sooner sell drinks in a bar. In fact, that’s probably what I would be doing, for there was precious little work in Pakistan, outside of the arms and drugs trade. And the sex trade, of course, despite their Muslim pretensions.

  “Who would we be working for, what’s the name of your organization?”

  “Double Eagle Security, Miz Beckett.”

  “An American company?”

  “As apple pie, yes.”

  “Ok, we’re interested. Let’s meet and talk it through. The Fez Bar, in one hour, will that suit you?”

  There was a short silence on the phone, and then I heard him say, “I’ll be there.”

  The Fez Bar was only a short distance away, but we rarely went in there. The drink prices were outrageous, which did at least keep out the riff raff. Except for the drug dealers and brothel owners, who could afford to drink there? Ed Walker was already sat at a table, and we joined him. It did give me a little satisfaction that after witnessing our downfall at the hands of our creditors, he had to ask for their help.

  “So what went wrong?” I asked him by way of a hello.

  He flushed. “The fucking pilot we hired, he’d been drinking. He swerved off the runway during take-off and put one of the wheels in a drainage ditch. The aircraft is out of action for several weeks until they can fly in replacement parts from the States.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” I said drily. “But look on the bright side. He could have messed up in the air, in which case you wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he muttered. “But my bosses are not too happy about it. This brings me to you guys. I noticed you had a problem yesterday, so I made enquiries. It seems you ran into some financial difficulties, so I came up with this idea. We can help keep your company afloat if you’re prepared to help us.”

  “You mean fly you and your bunch of mercenaries into Afghanistan?”

  “They’re not mercenaries, my friend. Every one of them is a licensed security operative.”

  “Give me a break, Walker. We’ve been here a while, and we know the score. When you say ‘help you’, what are you saying?”

  “As I said on the phone, we’d pick up your mortgage, and you’d sign a contract to fly our cargos exclusively. You pay us monthly installments out of the fees we pay you for your services.”

  “How long would this contract last?”

  “We’ll pay you regular cargo charter rates, so it would last until the debt is paid. We’ll allow enough for your expenses, fuel and so on.”

  I didn’t want it, not for any price. Before she died, my grandmother, Helene, had warned me about the CIA. ‘For every problem we had with the Vietcong, we had twice as many with the American military, and five times as many with the CIA. Keep away from them, Max. They’re poison. Their business is lying, and they’re very good at it.’

  I glanced aside at Rachel. “What do you think?”

  “It’s your company, Max. I just work for you.”

  Walker interrupted. “I gather you’re US Air Force, invalided out?”

  She nodded. “So what?”

  He shrugged. “It’s just that if you can’t fly for them, I wondered how you could keep going anywhere else.”

  Her face flushed red. “If you think the US Air Force is so fucking hot, get them to do the job for you. And even if they would do it, which I doubt, I can outfly any ten of those macho fighter jocks.”

  “Ok, sorry. I just had to ask. What do you think about the deal on the table?”

  “It’s up to Max, I told you.”

  “I thought you two were, like, engaged.”

  So he’d talked to the customs official in Tan Son Nhat about us. These people had a long reach, a very long reach. “No, we’re not,” she snapped.

  Walker turned back to me. “What do you say, Mr. Hoffman?”

  I knew I was cornered. He knew it, and Rachel knew it. But I would only go so far. I nodded.

&nbs
p; “Very well, here’s the deal. We’ll go with what you’re offering, Mr. Walker. But this is a strictly commercial deal. We want nothing to do with any black operations, no spy missions. Nothing like that, we fly in and out of commercial airfields, period. No midnight landings on isolated fields or country roads. We’re not part of the Air Force or CIA. We’ll do what we’ve always done, that’s it. We’re not about to become a subsidiary of Air America, or whatever you call it these days.”

  He smiled and held out his hand. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Hoffman. We’ll keep it strictly legit, so it’s a deal. Miz Beckett.”

  He shook our hands, and we toasted our agreement with another round of drinks the waiter brought for us in response to Walker’s wave. That was it. I realized we were back in business. Even if we had been forced to make a contract with the devil. I recalled that those contracts were always signed in blood, but he didn’t ask for it on this occasion. As we parted, Walker told us to report to Peshawar airfield tomorrow afternoon, by which time his lawyers and bankers would have ironed out the contracts. We were to fly out to Kabul in the afternoon. It was a short trip with no stops to refuel, which suited me. Our tanks were less than half full, and we would need to discuss a line of credit to buy aviation gas.

  “Our schedule had been put back a day or so, but it’s not a serious problem. Just be there tomorrow afternoon. We’ll go through the formalities, and we’re in business.”

  “One thing before we go. We have two smaller aircraft in our Kandahar base and three employees. What do we do about them?”

  He looked puzzled. “Do? I couldn’t give a damn what you do. That’s your affair, between you and the bankers. Just make sure you’re ready to fly out tomorrow.”

  I realized with a sinking heart that I’d have to contact our three part-timers in Kandahar and tell them they were unemployed. In Afghanistan, that often meant the difference between eating and starving. I got through to them eventually and promised to take them back on as soon as we were out of trouble. They knew how things were, as the liquidators had already seized the two aircraft towards the debt. They didn’t sound very happy about it all.

  But at least we had something to work with. Rachel and I went out to dinner to celebrate. We got a little drunk, and despite my determination to keep romance out of our working lives, we slept together that night. Rachel started it, pulling me to her and kissing me with a passion that was breathtaking. It was wonderful. She was one of the most agile women I’d ever slept with, and I’d been with a few. Asian women were supposed to be amongst the most skilled in the world at the arts of love, Muslim countries excepting, but Rachel could teach them all a thing or two. We kept at it for almost two hours, and by the time we pulled apart to grab some sleep, I was a hollowed out shell, totally spent. But it was worth it. When I awoke in the morning, she was next to me, still asleep and breathing evenly. I studied her face; she was truly beautiful. I wondered which of her eyes the false one was. They looked identical when she was awake, although now the lids were closed.

  “It’s the left one.”

  Her eyes flicked open, and she smiled a long, lazy, satisfied smile. Like a big cat that’d just devoured its prey. I thought about that, was it a reasonable comparison?

  “How did you know what I was thinking?”

  She grinned. “Men! We always know what you’re thinking, so just watch yourself. What time do we have to leave?”

  I checked my watch. “It’s just after nine. We could go and grab some coffee and breakfast, make it a leisurely morning, see some of the sights. I’ve got some food here. I’ll fix us lunch, and we can leave for the airfield afterwards to sign up with Mr. Ed Walker and his friends. Then I guess we take off for Kabul.”

  She turned her face towards mine. “Max, do you think he’s on the level, Ed Walker?”

  I laughed. “Not in a million years. I expect we’ll have to fight him every step of the way to get him to honor the contract, but it’s our only hope. Don’t worry, Rachel, we’ll manage.”

  She nodded uncertainly, then wiped the expression off her face and grinned. “I’m not really hungry yet, Max. Can’t we take a late breakfast, there’s no need to rush, is there?”

  She reached for me, and I couldn’t think of a single reason not to stay in bed for a while longer.

  When we reached the airport, Walker was waiting for us, checking his watch.

  “If you’re all set, we need to finalize the details and get moving,” Walker grunted at me.

  This time, he’d abandoned the Ralph Lauren and wore a set of beautifully cut combats, trousers and jacket. He had a camo scarf wrapped around his neck and sported a canvas shoulder holster over his jacket, the Ivy League at war. Eight men lounged a short distance away, and they made no effort to conceal their weapons. All of them had assault rifles within easy reach and a variety of handguns strapped to their belts. The Pakistani bankers were waiting for us too. They both looked uneasy in the presence of the small mercenary force. My own banker, Mr. Khan, had a half smile on his face. He was obviously glad that someone was buying the bank’s mortgage to save him the trouble of disposing of the assets at an inevitable loss. We signed the documents, and the moneymen disappeared. I now had control of the airline back from the bank, provided that I kept the agreement with the devil; and that they kept their agreement with me.

  “We’re overdue in Kabul. Can you get the show on the road, Hoffman?”

  Walker stared at me, not even trying to disguise his impatience. I noted the lack of a ‘Mister’ now that we’d signed the documents. Now he was the American overlord, and I was just the bellhop.

  “Sure. Do you want me to carry your bags, Sir? Any golf clubs this trip?”

  Rachel grinned. Walker gave me a nasty glare. “Just get the fucking plane into the air, Hoffman.”

  We flew towards the Khyber Pass, the scene of so many battles when this part of the world was ruled by Great Britain. During the journey, I went to check on our passengers. They were huddled in a group talking quietly. When they saw me enter the cabin, they went quiet. Walker stared at me.

  “What is it, Hoffman? We’re busy.”

  “I just came to ask if there was anything you wanted. Are you all ok?”

  “We’re fine. All we need is some peace and quiet.”

  One of his men grinned broadly at that.

  “Very well, but if there is anything, just let me know.”

  He’d already looked away, and as I entered the cockpit, they started talking between themselves. We left the Khyber Pass behind us, and we were in Afghanistan. We touched down shortly afterwards at Kabul International Airport.

  Despite half the country still having failed to crawl out of the middle ages, the airport was modern and busy. The architecture left something to be desired, but that was to be expected. It had been designed and built by the Soviets during their occupation, and the buildings bore the Communist stamp, bland, functional, and depressing. If it hadn’t been for the presence of hundreds of heavily armed soldiers everywhere, it may even have looked normal; as much as any Soviet era airport could look. Walker directed us to taxi to a hangar that was signed ‘Double Eagle Security’.

  “This will be your operating base while you’re in country.”

  I glanced at him. ‘In country’ was a phrase used by American soldiers when they served in Vietnam. He ignored my look.

  “When you’ve parked the aircraft, or whatever you do with it, instruct my people to get it refueled and checked out. I want you to be ready to fly out tomorrow. We leave at first light.”

  “What’s the destination and load, we’ll need…”

  “You’ll know all that tomorrow,” he cut me off. “It’s need to know out here, Hoffman. Anything else, don’t ask.”

  I nodded at him and glanced at Rachel. So that’s the way it was to be. We were flying truck drivers, no more, no less. She gave me a small, uncertain smile and tried to reassure me.

  “At least we’ll be flying out of ma
instream airfields, Max. No cloak and dagger stuff, that’s the agreement. Isn’t it?”

  I stared at her. “Yes, of course it is. That’s what he said. You’re right.”

  But how good was Ed Walker at keeping his agreements? As I watched his security men walk away, carrying their assault rifles, and the cargo handlers unloading the wooden crates, I felt a lightning bolt slash into my guts. I didn’t know why, but something was wrong, very wrong.

  * * *

  The Kabul-Kandahar Highway was a three hundred mile long road linking Afghanistan's two largest cities, Kabul and Kandahar. The highway was a key portion of Afghanistan's national road system, and more than a third of Afghanistan's population lived within thirty miles of the Kabul to Kandahar road. Rains led the column, conscious that on every yard of road they could encounter the enemy. Who the hell was the enemy? They all looked the same. Some of the men wore that strange hat, the pakul, which looked like a kind of odd-shaped meat pie. It was made famous by Massoud, the charismatic Mujahedeen leader who led his guerrillas against the Soviets so effectively during the eighties; and was later murdered by the Taliban when he led the Northern Alliance against them. Others wore turbans, some black, some were white, and others too filthy to pick out the color. They all wore tribal robes and carried weapons, many of them assault rifles. Most women wore blue burqas, the voluminous robe that made them all but invisible. I’d heard the men call them bluebottles. But who were the terrorists? He’d asked his sergeant, Mason, how to tell them apart.

  “Yeah, that’s the trick LT, how to tell them apart. It beats me.”

  So great, he was here to fight an enemy that was indistinguishable from the friendlies. Shit! At any moment, a mine could explode underneath their hull, or a rocket could strike the sides of the vehicle. They were well protected, with steel grilles to intercept a missile before it struck the hull, as well as massive armor protection that were proof against most things the enemy could throw at them. But most things weren’t all things, and every man flinched when they struck a bump, or there was an unexpected loud noise. It was unnerving. At one point, Rains opened up the hatch and observed the countryside they were passing through, but after the fifth false alarm, when they’d sighted possible insurgents, he stayed inside, battened down. If they needed to fight, the Protector M151 Remote Weapon Station mounted a .50-cal M2 machine gun, and an Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher. There was no need to expose the crew; all of the weapons could be operated and rearmed from inside the armored hull. Not so the Afghan Army regulars who manned the soft skinned trucks. To a man, they were sullen and defeated, with eyes that were unfocussed, dark pits. They counted themselves already dead, no doubt. Rains had done his best to instill some confidence in them. He’d spoken to the Lieutenant in charge of the M35 two and a half ton cargo trucks. The US military had used them in Iraq, with additional armor to protect them against mines. The Afghan National Army vehicles did not carry such protection, and a fact the Afghans were very conscious of.