The laughs and the losing bet brought attention back to the game. Forking over a handful of bills, Bob Hartley then enticed their circle of gamblers into a game of Five-Oh-One, the FBI tactical trio’s intention all along.
Cliff Towler had served as a Marine liaison captain with the British Royal Marines, and had learned darts the hard way. After having his clock cleaned along with his wallet, the American sharpened his skills on Five-Oh-One and Three-Oh-One, and learned the bull’s-eye betting hustle from the British Marines as well.
Suddenly, a woman’s wail after a hard thud and the crash of breaking glass drew everyone’s attention to the far corner. Ray-Dean Blevins stood over Francoise after having given her a hard whack to the chops. She tried to crawl away, but he put the toe of his boot in her ass, delivering a cruel blow.
Liberty came straight up out of her seat, blazing, and before anyone else could do a thing, she had laid the inside of her forearm, the point just below her elbow, flat across Ray-Dean Blevins’s face.
Blood sprayed as his nose exploded, and Cooder-with-a-D tumbled backwards into the booth where he and Francoise had sat.
When Chris Gray got there, Agent Cruz had already helped the French reporter to her feet.
Instead of a thank-you, however, enraged Francoise pulled her arm from Liberty’s grasp and let loose a slur of French words, first at Ray-Dean Blevins, then at the woman who had come to her aid.
“You Americans!” Francoise screamed. “All alike! You think you can solve the problems of the world, but all you do is destroy and kill. You come to this country, so big and proud of yourselves. You know all the answers, don’t you? Putting in your puppet regime. Always getting your way. You care nothing for the people you murder. Go to hell, American fuckers! All of you!”
With that, Francoise spit a glob of blood on the floor and tromped across the bar and out the door in her click-clack glittery shoes and snatch-hugging tight pants.
Liberty blinked at Chris Gray and her three men, who now stood with him among a crowd of mercenary contractors from around the planet. Then she looked down at Ray-Dean Blevins, slumped back in his seat with a wad of napkins crammed in his nose.
“Only a weak-assed coward of a man hits a woman!” she fired at Cooder-with-a-D.
Blevins just blinked.
The angry woman then pushed her way through the wall of men, parting them like Moses, and went back to her table, where she picked up her whiskey and threw it into the back of her throat. She looked at the barkeep, and roared, “Ajax, bring me a triple!”
Every man in the place, except for Ray-Dean Blevins, began clapping.
Chris Gray sat back down and relit Liberty’s cigar, then his own.
“I think that went remarkably well, don’t you?” He smiled. “We certainly have their attention now.”
“I’m sorry,” Liberty said. “I lost it when that asshole kicked that poor woman. Slugging her wasn’t bad enough, he had to put his boot in her ass.”
“That new best friend you just made over there, nursing his broken nose, is Cesare Alosi’s gofer boy, Ray-Dean Blevins,” Gray said. “Grade A slime, and capable of anything, including cold-blooded murder. You’ll need to watch your back with him now. That elbow smash on the hooter you gave him, in front of all these admirers? He’ll definitely want revenge.”
“Am I supposed to be scared?” Liberty asked, as Ajax delivered her a glass and a full bottle of Maker’s Mark.
“Not scared, but you do need to be cautious,” the bartender said before Gray could respond. Then he added, “Everything tonight’s on the house. I can’t count the times that scumbag has beat that poor woman. No one has ever stepped in until you did. Nobody wants trouble with him. Like most cowards, he’ll never face you head-on but will shoot you in the back.”
Liberty gave Blevins another glance as he sat in his booth alone, napkins stuffed in his nose, glaring at her.
“I’ll keep that in mind, Ajax,” she said.
“Welcome to my world, Miz Cruz.” Gray smiled.
She looked at Chris. “What’s the story on the woman?”
“Francoise Theuriau, so her passport reads,” Gray began. “She works freelance out of the London bureau of the Massachusetts Democrat and Morning News, a progressive left fish wrapper in Boston. As you’d expect, they’re critical of the war, Congress, the president, American Constitutionalism, and democracy in general.
“We ran deep background on her because she still has my terrorism antennas vibrating. She hails from Marseilles, but her French passport home address is in Avignon, where she also went to college at Université d’Avignon.”
“Oh, he speaks French,” Liberty said, and smiled at the way Chris rolled out the university’s name with its French pronunciation.
“I did the Rosetta Stone course that State Department puts out,” Gray said.
“So did Jack,” Liberty said. “He’s quite good with languages. He grew up speaking Spanish, from his mother, but then learned Castellón and Andalusian dialects, because of her classical Spanish background. That branched into Portuguese and French. Italian is next on his list, because I speak Italian and want to live in Milan someday, after I make my millions,” she finished with a little laugh.
“Now I feel inadequate,” Gray said. “How about Japanese? Jack Valentine master that, too?”
“I think he has the barroom pickup lines down pat, from his time in Okinawa,” Liberty said.
“Yeah, me, too,” Gray said. “Okinawa, Philippines, and South Korea gave me, like most Marines, a good foundation of international barroom and taxi language skills.”
“I get so tickled when you Marines go into your bar-girl routines.” Liberty laughed. “You should hear Jack. What is it? Hello, GI. You buy me drink? Payday come, I love you big-time. Come on, I so horny. We go boom-boom.”
“I love you long time. Make boom-boom all night. You want short time, that okay, too.” Gray laughed. “Take me stateside, I love you plenty. Buy me Honda. Get me green card. Take me big PX.”
“Oh, yeah.” She laughed. “Do they really say all that silly crap?”
“That and more. We don’t just make this shit up.” The CIA operator smiled. “I think it’s an acquired art form. Young privates and lance corporals, hitting the rock for the first time? They call them chiisai sakana, little fish. A sergeant or a young lieutenant, they’re ookii sakana, big fish. The bar girls reel them in and drag them to the altar, tak’san and sukoshi alike.”
“Jack calls it going native,” Liberty said.
“I have friends who have good marriages to some of these girls,” Gray said. “But most cases, it’s hookers doing what hookers do.”
“So this French reporter?” Liberty asked. “She doesn’t strike me as a hooker trying for a brass ring.”
Gray nodded. “Naw, just a slut reporter. But then, the great spy Mata Hari was a slut, too. Francoise definitely makes my intel nose itch.”
“You put her under surveillance?” Cruz said.
“Sparingly and very carefully,” Gray said. “Don’t forget, she is a news reporter, a member of the press corps, covering the war for an American newspaper. Even if the rag unabashedly hates everything about the government and what we’re doing. We get caught watching her, we’re screwed.”
“Politics.” Liberty sighed. Then she looked around the room. It had settled back into darts and drinking. Ray-Dean Blevins had joined two other American contractors at a different booth. She nodded in their direction. “And how about those guys?”
“Frank-n-Stein,” Gray said.
“Which one is that?” Cruz said, trying to not get caught watching them.
“Blevins’s security team,” Chris said. “Gary Frank. Squirrely guy sitting next to Ray-Dean. Former Marine Corps public-affairs sergeant. Malone-Leyva’s press-relations man and a bed wetter. He’s got a reputation of not
holding his liquor and it running down his leg when he gets excited.”
“And the guy across the table I suppose is something or other Stein?” Liberty asked, way ahead of Gray.
“You got it,” Chris answered. “Fred Stein. Former Army Ranger, hard-stripe sergeant. He’s a real special case of steroids and earwax. Obviously hated his father and loved his mother. Really loved his mother.”
Liberty laughed, then added, “The opposite of the blonde with daddy issues?”
“Freddie likes them old and no teeth,” Chris said. “I have several stories of him in the villages, committing rape of women well past childbearing years.” “Disgusting!” Liberty shuddered.
“You want to dredge up the dirt on Alosi and Malone-Leyva, these are your boys,” Gray said. “I’ve got a notebook full of interesting reading on that crew.”
“I’d like to see it,” she said. “Seriously.”
“Sure,” Gray said. “I’ll drop it by your place.”
“And nobody does anything about them?” Cruz asked.
“They’re outside most jurisdictions, as you well know, and the law that matters doesn’t care about the likes of them. Bad politics to the hand that feeds,” Gray said.
“You should be in the FBI,” Liberty said. “Jason Kendrick would put you to work, knowing you and all.”
“My job.” Gray smiled. “I don’t worry about jurisdictions or Miranda rights. I get to kill the low-life motherfuckers.”
Liberty lifted her glass. “Here’s to that.”
Ray-Dean Blevins’s nose had already swollen double in size, and both nostrils had shut. When he talked, it came out muted and whiny. He held a cold beer bottle against his throbbing head as Freddie Stein and Gary Frank kept looking at Liberty Cruz sitting and laughing with the CIA operator.
“That’s her, dude,” Gary said, and snapped his glance away as the woman looked at him. “Definitely the bitch in the picture.”
“You think Cesare knows she’s in town?” Fred Stein asked Ray-Dean.
Blevins looked at her and sneered. “Fuck Alosi, and fuck her.”
“I’d like to,” Stein came back. “Her that is. Not Cesare. I don’t swing that direction.”
“You suck dick and take it up the ass, Freddie. Admit it,” Gary Frank said, trying to sound tough to his buddies.
“I’ll show you how to suck dick when I feed you mine,” Ray-Dean said. “I’ll hold your hands while Freddie jams his cock balls-deep up your ass.”
“And you’ll love it.” Stein smirked.
“I’m not queer, you guys!” Gary Frank sang back.
“You’re always talking about sucking dick and butt fucking,” Ray-Dean said.
“Guilty dogs bark loudest,” Freddie piled on.
“Dude,” Ray-Dean said. “Gay’s okay. Hell, you might come in handy. I’m sure as shit not getting any pussy off Francoise anytime soon.”
“What was that shit about, anyway?” Stein asked. “You thumping her ass?”
“I had some stuff at my place. Bonus material I copped over at MARSCOC headquarters, to win me some points with Cesare. You know, worth a few coins?” Ray-Dean explained. “Filthy cunt had pictures of my shit on her cell phone. I sat here and started thumbing through her crap, and up comes pictures of my shit. Fucking cunt! She must have took them when I was sleeping.”
“She’s working for Alosi, I bet. Getting it from you for free so he doesn’t have to pony up,” Gary Frank said.
Ray-Dean nodded. “My guess, too. That’s Alosi’s style. He’s tight with her. I don’t trust that motherfucker whatsoever.”
“And we’re sure that’s Cesare’s girlfriend over there?” Gary Frank said, unsure with this as he was with everything.
“Fuckin’ A, dude,” Freddie said. “You said it yourself. That’s her. Same bitch in the fucking picture he has sitting on his desk.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Ray-Dean said. “Now I owe the cunt big-time. Break my nose with a sucker punch? Shit, I never saw it coming. Humiliate me like that? She’s fucking dead.”
Freddie, Gary, and Ray-Dean all nodded as they looked at Liberty Cruz and Chris Gray.
“You picking up on those three yo-yos’ body language?” Bob Hartley mumbled to Cliff Towler and Casey Runyan, leaning against the bar, drinking Amstel Light in bottles.
“She really shouldn’t have gotten involved with that fool. Let someone else be the hero,” Towler said, and the other two FBI tactical operators nodded, agreeing.
“I don’t fault her for much,” Bob Hartley said. “She’s a solid operator, but her one failing is that big heart tied right to her hot button. Emotional knee-jerking, even if it’s justified, will get us killed.”
“Fucking funny, though,” Casey said. “The way she laid out that piece of shit. One shot, and bang! He’s done!”
“What do you suppose those fools are plotting?” Hartley asked his team, and took another look at the whiskey level of the quart bottle with the red-wax-covered top sitting on the table between Liberty Cruz and Chris Gray.
“We need to clear her out,” Towler said.
“Yeah,” Hartley said. “She’s sucked down a good third of that quart bottle by herself. I don’t think Gray took more than one or two hits. But the lady can put it away. I’m getting buzzed just watching.”
“What if we start something with those three assholes?” Runyan suggested. “A little delay action to give her a chance to disappear.”
“Probably not a bad idea,” Bob agreed. “Keep those shitheads pinned down. They get out of here ahead of us, I’m betting they’ll try an ambush before she can get two blocks down the street.”
“That or follow her to the apartment and do something after she’s turned in,” Towler said.
“I wish she hadn’t fucked around with that asshole.” Hartley sighed.
“Yeah, that’s what I said when my wife divorced me last year and married her boss.” Casey Runyan chuckled.
“Alright, guys,” Hartley said. “I’ll play the drunk. You come fetch me out of trouble. If we’re lucky, we won’t kill them.”
Liberty noticed that Bob Hartley had turned his baseball cap sideways as he came staggering toward them.
“You okay?” she said, as he ran into her table and knocked over the bottle of whiskey.
Chris Gray saw the wink and took Liberty’s hand.
“Why don’t we get out of here?” he suggested.
“You sure?” Liberty asked, not seeing Hartley motioning his eyes to the door but Gray getting the message.
“I’m sure,” Chris said. “We need to go. Right now.”
Then Liberty saw Bob Hartley making a beeline toward the booth where Ray-Dean and his boys sat, sucking on Heinekens.
“Right,” she said, and got to her feet.
As the couple hurried out the Baghdad Country Club’s front door, the long cool woman from the FBI could hear the commotion. Tables crashed. Glass broke. Two blasts of a shotgun. Then quiet.
Liberty turned, started to go back, worried about her boys, but she stopped as Ajax came out the door with a smoking Mossberg pump-action folding-stock alley sweeper in his hands. He looked around, making sure more trouble wasn’t headed his way, and saw Liberty.
“It’s okay!” he said, giving her an assuring smile. “We’re all friends again.”
—
When the Osprey had dropped Jack Valentine and his seven Marines far in the desert, west of the Euphrates, the team immediately pushed even farther west, following a dusty ravine to a rocky outcrop that gave them good cover until dark. They rested there and filled their stomachs until night, taking turns on security, with two men always on lookout.
With moonrise six hours away, blackest darkness shrouded them well as they pushed north, staying parallel with the Euphrates River’s direction. Full combat kits strapped o
n their backs, loaded heavy with extra water and ammunition, testing their endurance, the eight men route-stepped ten miles into their hunting territory, west of Haditha and Haqlaniyah, and north of a dry wadi called Ashwa. To the south of them, at a camp called Wolf, a battery of American artillery with a list of on-call targets sat available for Jack and his Marines if they needed it.
Twenty miles northeast, First Sergeant Alvin Barkley kept a sergeant in his radio section tuned to Jack’s team’s frequency, paying attention to their reporting points, as they came in, and making sure the operations gunny had the eight-man MARSOC team’s positions and activities updated on his map. At the same time, the S2 recorded all the reconnaissance sightings that Jack and his Marines reported. Should shit hit the fan, a react team stood ready to respond and hopefully extract the eight Scout-Snipers intact if they could get to them in time.
Jack’s plan of going deep into the western desert and angling through the back door into their hunting grounds, on foot from the southwest, far from even remote populations, had effectively eliminated nearly every chance of barking dogs giving them away or watching eyes detecting them. No helicopters. No trucks. No Ospreys. No noise or flashing lights. They had slipped silently into the heart of these badlands as ghosts.
A golden moon rose over the eastern horizon as Jack and his boys settled into a line of hides that extended more than two miles along a rocky ridge above a dry rill that ran southeast, passing beneath MSR Bronze, where it ended at a bend on the Euphrates between Haqlaniyah and Haditha. Meandering parallel to this hardly noticeable rise of rocks and hard earth that followed the dry stream, a dirt road, crisscrossing other desert trails, likewise extended toward Syria, coming from the southeast, where it converged with other goat tracks networking the farms on the west side of the ancient Euphrates River, and extending from where the Marines lay to the northwest desert’s oblivion.
If Jack and the boys had to make a run for it, they planned to double-time down the dry streambed that gave them good footing and overhead cover while a straight shot to MSR Bronze and the river, some miles away. It would be a haul, running with a hundred pounds of gear on each man’s back, but it would have to do. Hopefully, Alvin Barkley and his reaction force would get to them in time if the proverbial shit hit the fan.
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