“They don’t do much good anymore. The tangos have imported a passive infrared trick from Hezbollah-thank you Iran.”
“ECMs really don’t work?”
“Nope. Not with a totally passive infrared system. You enter the IR footprint of one of those and you’re Swiss cheese-even in one of these armored babies.”
“Anything you can do about them?” Hunter said as he watched a pickup overloaded with refrigerators and stoves slow down to give them room.
“The recommendation is to use thermal vision to spot a temp differential from the surrounding objects, but I think your best bet is never to ride in the front vehicle.”
“Head’s up. White van tracking us. Over there on the service road,” one of the shooters said as he pointed his AK at the driver.
The Ford Expedition weaved in and out of traffic, speeding up. One hundred ten. One hundred fifteen. One hundred twenty miles an hour and the speed was increasing. Heavy bulletproof windows couldn’t always be trusted to roll back up when it counted the most, so the men sitting by the doors cracked them open and stuck the barrels of their weapons outside. Without exchanging a word, the guy sandwiched in the middle passed Hunter his weapon. Hunter shoved the IV bag into Jackie’s lap and opened the door just enough.
The white van sped up.
“What do you think?”
“Not good.”
The Rubicon SUV ahead of them swerved toward the ditch, kicking up dust. Suddenly Hunter saw why. A compact car stuffed with a family was in front of them, creeping along the road and they were hurtling toward it. In a fraction of a second, they were on its bumper. The Rubicon driver swung into the shoulder, passing the car on the right, driving into the dust cloud. The Ford Expedition bounced so hard Hunter’s head hit the door frame and he started to fall out the door. He grabbed for anything he could find and held on to the seatbelt as he hung outside the door. Even though visibility was only inches, he was staring straight down at a blur of garbage, churned-up earth and discarded plastic bags.
He snagged his foot under the passenger seat and pulled himself upright into the cab. Seconds later they emerged from the dust cloud, four feet from the white van. The van’s driver pointed something at him.
Hunter leaned out and started to squeeze the trigger, then he realized it wasn’t a gun, but a finger.
“Hold fire!” Hunter shouted, but not in time. The van’s window exploded into fragments. The driver slumped over the wheel and the van veered toward them.
“Look out!” Hunter said.
Their Ford Expedition took a sharp left, throwing Hunter back toward the door. He held onto the seat as the door swung open, then back a little. Hunter waited until the ride smoothed out, then held onto the frame, leaned back outside and pulled the heavy armored door shut.
They were back on the main road, again zipping between cars, trying to catch up to the lead vehicles in the convoy. He looked back and saw the white van hit one of the countless decapitated palm trees that line Iraqi highways. Then he glanced at Jackie. She was staring straight ahead, her eyes wide.
The Rubicon team leader turned up the music and Elvis was rocking over his new blue suede shoes.
Jackie whispered to Hunter. “That was a finger. He was pretending to shoot with his finger. He even mouthed ‘Bang.’ I saw it right before-”
“Yeah, he was acting stupid and it got him killed. But it’s big boy rules out here.” Hunter whispered, trying to keep his voice below the music. Now back in his seat, Hunter squeezed the saline bag as he returned it to his lap. “The Iraqis are fed up with the occupation and it’s hard to blame them. Could you imagine carloads of heavily armed Iraqi contractors speeding down the Beltway in DC during rush hour and shooting at any vehicle that spooked them? But as long as we’re here, it’s got to be this way. A vehicle speeding up to approach a convoy is either a suicide bomber or someone committing suicide. You don’t come close to an American vehicle and everyone knows it. That’s why we have those little signs warning everyone to stay back. We’re authorized to use lethal force. Like I said, big boy rules.”
“It was a finger, for god’s sake.”
“There was a dust cloud and it was nautical twilight. It’s a split-second decision.”
The shooter in the backseat made eye contact with Hunter and grinned. “Road rage, man. Commuting is a real bitch.”
“BK, you saying you’re ready to get shipped home to avoid the commute?” the team leader said.
“No way. I’ll take this over a civilian job any day. You know when I worked at Burger King I actually had to smile at people? You didn’t hear me asking those tangos, ‘You want fries with that?’ Those days are over, man. I make in a day what I used to take home in a month. Hey, maybe I ought to start shouting that every time I shoot a tango. It could be my tagline.” BK held his AK, pointed it at a truck and pretended to shoot. It veered off the road and into the ditch. “You want fries with that, tango-man?”
The men laughed.
Hunter didn’t. He closed his eyes and saw the van driver pointing his finger at him. Bang.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Triple Canopy grew to over 800 employees and earned annual revenues exceeding $100 million within its first year of operation.
– Triple Canopy, Inc.
Blackwater was originally slated to be paid $229.5 million for five years, according to a State Department contract list. Yet as of June 30, just two years into the program, it had been paid a total of $321,715,794.
– The Nation, 28 Aug, 2006, as reported by Jeremy Scahill
Camp Raven, Black Management Iraqi Headquarters
The Green Zone, Baghdad
The car lights glistened off the shiny silver retro-style trailer in the former parking lots across from the presidential palace. During Operation Iraqi Freedom I, when Hunter was fighting his way into Baghdad alongside the legendary Colonel Dunford, Camille quit the CIA and was in Hollywood mortgaging everything she owned and negotiating with a movie studio to buy a luxury trailer that had become too rundown for their starlets. Within six weeks, the trailer was in Baghdad and Camille was courting military brass for contracts in the Green Zone’s first speakeasy. The war had been good for business and the current drawdown of troops was a bonanza. Each soldier pulled out meant a vacuum that had to be filled. The Iraqis weren’t up to the task and America was too deeply involved to roll over and allow room for al Qaeda to move in.
Enter Black Management.
Enter Triple Canopy.
Enter Rubicon Solutions.
Enter Blackwater.
Only families cared about dead contractors-Pentagon body counts didn’t. Relying even more heavily upon the private military corporations, the US was able to quietly maintain a constant level of influence while the American public celebrated the homecoming of the troops.
Alcohol now flowed more or less freely in the Green Zone and Black Management’s reputation for the best operators in the Iraq and Afghan theaters pulled in the contracts, so the speakeasy had long ago given way to formal offices. Black Management headquarters had expanded into three low concrete buildings with four-foot-thick ceilings engineered with layers of cutting-edge materials designed to absorb mortar blasts. Two clamshell maintenance hangers housed helicopters undergoing repairs and their Baghdad fleet of Black Hawks, Little Birds and Super-Cobra attack helicopters were parked on the ramp. But upon Camille’s insistence, the original Hollywood trailer had been preserved.
Camille stepped inside it, fondling those early dreams.