Cabrillo found Max running a scrapyard outside of Barstow, California, and in the course of ten minutes had him tossing the keys to the place to his assistant and heading out the door. By the time the Oregon had been selected as their base of operations and her conversion work completed in Vladivostok by a corrupt Russian admiral who loved Yankee dollars and Korean girls in equal measure, the two men were like an old married couple. Sure they argued, but they never lost respect for each other.
Hanley later admitted he would have followed Juan out of the junkyard after the first sixty seconds of his pitch.
“So that’s him on paper,” Max said over the secure phone link. He was aboard their ship still anchored just off Karachi.
“Pretty damned impressive,” Juan opined. He’d called Max as they were driving along the six-lane superhighway connecting the Khyber Pass to Islamabad and asked him to run a full background check on Marion MacDougal Lawless. “Two years at Tulane, but he left and joined the Army as a Nine-Twelve-er.” Meaning the day after the September 11th terrorist attacks he’d walked into an Army recruiting station and signed on as a common soldier, like thousands of other brave men and women.
“Got into the Rangers, excelled by all accounts. He racked up a couple of combat citations, and after eight years opted out to join up with Fortran Security as a private contractor.
“Same skill set as a Ranger,” Max said, “only ten times the pay.”
“I know Fortran,” Juan countered. “They’re a top-notch outfit, so they pay more like twenty times.”
“Whatever,” Max said in his normally irritated manner. “He’s got an ex-wife and a daughter. Nearly all his pay goes to an address in New Orleans that I can only assume is the ex.”
“Only one, huh,” Juan teased. Max had three, and alimony payments to all of them.
“We’re in the middle of a recession. There are thousands of out-of-work comedians out there, and you think you are funny? Talk about delusions of grandeur. Anyway. Like I said, that’s him on paper, what’s the real version like?”
“Max, I’ll tell you. He’s been beat six ways to Sunday, and while I’m rubbernecking a technical getting blown up he sees the Predator I know is out there fire its missile and moves like nothing I’ve ever seen before. He saved our lives. No two ways about it.”
“So?” Hanley prompted.
“Since we lost Jerry Pulaski in Argentina, we’ve been down one gundog. I want to talk it over with Eddie, as head of shore operations, and Linc, as our lead war fighter, but I think we might have our replacement. He was an Army Ranger for eight years and has spent a lot of time deep in the ugliness. Not to mention he managed to impress me in just over an hour of knowing him.”
“What about his contract with Fortran?” Max asked. “Also, I would like to verify the story of how he got captured. Just playing devil’s advocate, but maybe this guy’s lost his edge.”
“I’ll talk to him and follow up with you before I make any decision,” Cabrillo promised. “Any word from the Setiawan’s dad?”
“There’s an air-ambulance jet at Karachi Airport. The old man didn’t come, but he sent his wife and the kid’s grandparents. I let them know as soon as you hit the Islamabad road that you would be here soon. What’s your ETA?”
“Another forty minutes.”
“Okay. George is already on the tarmac in the chopper to ferry you guys out to the ship, and we’ve maybe got another job lined up.”
“Really? That was fast.”
“Came through from L’Enfant. Some Swiss financier’s daughter crossed the border from Bangladesh into Myanmar, and he now can’t raise her on her sat phone. He’s afraid something’s happened to her and wants us to get her out.”
“Two questions,” Juan said. “What’s she doing in that godforsaken area in the first place and, second, has he been in contact with the government?” The first was really rhetorical. It didn’t matter. But the second was critical.
“No. He’s a smart guy. He knew that if he reached out to the ruling junta, his daughter would be hunted down and either ransomed or imprisoned for life.”
“That’s good. Listen, we’ll talk about it when we get back to the ship. Meanwhile, start a background check on the financier and his daughter and anyone she was traveling with.”
“Eric and Mark are already on it.”
“Oh too, if MacD comes back with us, it’ll be on a limited access basis for now. Tell Hux to bring her medical bag to meet us. I want her to make sure the guy’s not worse off than he’s letting on.”
“Ranger tough, huh?”
“Macho 101 is the first class they teach at Benning.” Juan killed the connection.
In the main cabin of the executive jet, Linda was bent over Seti, checking on his condition. He asked how the boy was doing.
“The sedative’s starting to wear off. I don’t want to risk giving him any more, but I also don’t want him regaining consciousness before we transfer him.”
“They have an air ambulance waiting. If you juice him a little, they’ll be able to handle it.”
“Okay.”
Linc and MacD Lawless were swapping Afghanistan war stories. Linc’s had been one of the first pairs of boots on the ground while MacD hadn’t gotten into the country until a few years later. They didn’t know any of the same people, but the situations they’d faced were usually similar, especially when dealing with the locals.
“Pardon the interruption,” Juan said. “MacD, can I have a word with you?”
“Sure.” He set aside the bottled water he’d been sipping and limped after the Chairman to the rear of the aircraft. “What’s up?”
“How’d it happen?”
Lawless immediately grasped what he was being asked. “There were three of us guarding a Pakistani TV crew—myself and two locals we’d worked with before. We were about an hour out of Kabul when the cameraman asks to pull over. Ah tell him it’s a real bad idea, but he said it was an emergency. The terrain was clear, so Ah figure, what the hell. We pull over, and no sooner had the wheels stopped turning than about a dozen Taliban materialize out of the ground. They’d been hiding under blankets that they covered with sand. It was a perfect ambush. Ah didn’t even get a shot off.
“The camera crew was a plant. They killed the two Afghan guards on the spot and trussed me up like a Thanksgiving turkey. They stole our truck, and, well, you pretty much know the rest. At some point Ah was transferred to the trunk of a car, Ah think before we crossed into Pakistan, but there’s no way to be sure. Whenever they got the chance, they’d smack me around some, and brag about how Ah was going to be a hit on the al-Qaeda version of YouTube.”
He spoke as if he were reporting the events of someone else’s life. Cabrillo suspected that it was still too fresh in his mind. The one thing he could tell was that Lawless regretted what had happened to the two Afghans more than his own capture.
“By now,” Juan said, “you’ve figured out what we do, yes?”
“Private security, like Fortran.”
“It goes well beyond that. We’re also an intelligence gathering operation. We do some consultancy, and we take on some ops for Uncle Sam when he needs complete deniability, though for reasons that aren’t important right now that line of work has dried up for the time being. We thoroughly vet all our clients. We work only for the good guys, if you follow my meaning. And we work so far under the grid that only a handful of people in the world know who we are. Your bosses at Fortran, for example, have no idea. You won’t see us mentioned in the media because I run a tight outfit that leaves no room for error.”