The Return Of Dog Team Read online

  Practical considerations of a survival-related nature returned almost immediately, shattering the somber mood. There was a job to be done. Steve would do what it took to get that job done. He began searching Prester’s pockets, seeking he knew not what. Anything he could use: weapons, ammo, a communicator, ID, documents. Whatever.

  A voice from behind him said, “Freeze.”

  Eighteen

  Debbie Lynn Hawley said, “Toss the gun. Not drop—toss. Toss it away from you, and do it now. Do it!”

  Steve Ireland did it, slinging the pistol away from him. It fell on its side in a dirt pile. Debbie Lynn had the drop on him, and he couldn’t beat that. Obedience would buy him a little more time.

  “Okay, you can turn around now. Slowly, and with your hands held away from your sides,” she said. “And no tricks.”

  He rose from where he’d been kneeling beside Prester, turning to face her. Debbie Lynn Hawley stood facing him about fifteen feet away, holding a gun leveled at him. Her weapon was a 9-mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol.

  Some of the shine had rubbed off her. She’d been shot in the calf muscle of her right leg. She’d taken off her top and shredded it into strips that she’d used as makeshift bandages, binding up the wounded area of her leg. The wrappings were bloodstained.

  She was naked from the waist up, under a flak jacket. Even under the circumstances, Steve couldn’t help but check her out. He had to admit she looked pretty good, even after the mussing up she’d taken. You would never figure her for a traitor and mass murderer. More proof, as if any were needed, that appearances can be deceiving.

  She’d pressed a dead tree branch into service as a kind of a crutch. It had a Y-shaped yoke and a long, thick shaft. The yoke was wedged under her right arm, propping her up, supporting her on her right side. Her wounded leg was bent at the knee and she was favoring it, using the crutch to try and keep as much weight off it as she could. She held the gun in her left hand, holding it close to her, with her elbow at her side. Debbie Lynn was dirty and disheveled. She was hurting. Her fine-boned, elfin face showed the effects of the pain; she looked ten years older. Her teeth were clenched. Her hand on the gun was steady enough, though.

  She shook her head in disbelief and said, “Man, you’re hard to kill. I didn’t think any of you soldier boys had survived the blast.” She gestured toward Prester. “He was hard to kill, too. It was all that alcohol swilling and that lounge lizard act he put on. It was all a pose, but it fooled me. When the showdown came, he moved a lot faster than I’d expected.”

  “Why tell me?” asked Steve.

  “Maybe I like a chance to gloat and show off how smart I am,” she said. “Usually I have to hide my light under a bushel.”

  “Where’d you hide the bomb?”

  She laughed, showing fine white teeth. They looked especially bright against her begrimed face. “I didn’t hide it at all,” she said. “The Pasdaran did. That’s the Iranian secret service to you, G.I.”

  “Where do they come in?”

  “Your team hit the farmhouse and closed down the brain-drain pipeline. That’s reason enough for them to want revenge. And Prester and a couple of his associates put a big hurting on Tehran when they whacked Colonel Munghal.”

  “Tough.”

  “Times are hard all over,” she said brightly. “Pasdaran agents rigged the site last night, planting a shitload of explosives all over the place. What with the tanks and pools and whatnot, there were so many places to hide a bomb that nobody could find them all.

  “You didn’t,” she added, laughing. Her laughter was thin and trilling, like a fragment of warbling bird song.

  Steve didn’t kid himself. His chances looked bad—in fact, virtually nil. There was his knife, but she’d gun him before he drew it from the sheath. He wondered if he could catch a couple of slugs and still tag her with a thrown knife. Maybe, if he didn’t catch one in the head.

  He said, “Tell me one thing. Why do you do it? Is it the money?”

  “It helps,” she admitted. “But that’s not the real reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “You might say I’m in with the in crowd.”

  “That’s not how I’d say it, but let it pass. Who are they?”

  “Idealists,” said Debbie Lynn Hawley.

  Steve Ireland laughed out loud.

  She didn’t like being laughed at. Her face flushed and her eyes hardened. “Peasants always laugh at what they don’t understand,” she said.

  He said, “I’m willing to give it a try.”

  “You just want to stay alive a little longer.”

  “Sure.”

  “See if you can wrap your caveman brain around this. The age of the nation-state is over.”

  Steve tried to keep from smirking. “That’ll come as a big surprise to a lot of people.”

  “So did Nine Eleven,” she countered. “Patriotism is obsolete. It’s an outmoded concept. Capital knows no boundaries and floats freely around the globe to seek its own level. The new lords are those who’ve absorbed this simple fact and act upon it.”

  Steve scoffed. “Sounds like some of that New World Order doubletalk to me.”

  “Never mind the labels,” Debbie Lynn said. “It’s all about the Golden Rule. He who has the gold, rules. You flag-waving, nationalistic nitwits are obsolete. You’re dinosaurs. And you know what happened to the dinosaurs, don’t you, soldier boy?”

  Her face was set in hard lines, and her eyes were glittering slits. She liked to talk. Steve Ireland had traded on that to eke out a few more precious moments of life. But one thing was clear. As much as she liked to talk, Debbie Lynn liked to kill even better.

  “The dinosaurs are extinct,” she said, answering her own question. She raised the gun, pointing it at his face. “So are you,” she said.

  A shot was fired, but not from Debbie Lynn’s gun.

  It cut her homemade crutch in two. She’d been leaning on it heavily, putting plenty of weight on it. Now, with that support cut out from her, she folded up and dropped.

  Her face showed surprise, eyebrows arching and mouth compressed to a tight wondering O. That lasted until she hit the ground, reinjuring her wounded leg. She shrieked, a keening puma cry.

  Throughout she’d kept hold of her gun. She flopped on the ground and started shooting. Pain sent a wash of tears flooding her eyes, obscuring her vision. She was firing blind, pumping slugs in the direction where she had last seen Steve.

  He wasn’t there, having already thrown himself to one side. Debbie Lynn rose, standing on her knees, still shooting. Steve had hit the ground and came up rolling, drawing the knife from its sheath and throwing it at her. A glinting pinwheel, it came to rest point-first deep in the middle of her throat. If she’d been a man, it would have split her Adam’s apple.

  Debbie Lynn stopped shooting. She held herself very stiffly. Her head bowed, dipping, only it couldn’t sink too low because the underside of her chin bumped up against the knife. Her lips parted, blood spilling from her mouth and splashing her chin. She fell forward, face down. Her weight pushed the blade deeper into her throat, so that the point of it came out the back of her neck. Not so much as a twitch or a tremor from her. She was gone.

  Steve Ireland looked at his hands. He was surprised that he’d managed to hit the target, they were shaking so. He still managed to scoop up Prester’s pistol with them.

  A figure showed in the middle ground of the battered hillside. Kilroy. He stood holding a rifle, an AK-47 with a wisp of smoke curling from the barrel. He nodded companionably at Steve and started toward him.

  He went to where Debbie Lynn Hawley lay face down. He glanced at the knife point sticking out of the back of her neck, favoring it with a little, appreciative nod, as if to say, Well done!

  “Nice blade work. Like I said, you’ve got talent,” said Kilroy.

  “Thanks,” Steve said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “That you couldn’t, son, and I’m glad you�
�ve got sense enough to realize it. You owe me big.”

  “I’m sure you won’t be shy about collecting on it.”

  “I surely won’t, and that’s a fact.”

  Steve said, “Too bad you didn’t get here sooner.”

  “Not necessarily. Then I might’ve got blowed up, too,” Kilroy said. “Prester had me checking out a couple of leads for him. The tip about the pumphouse seemed too pat and he wanted me to cross-check some of the informants. Never did get anything definite nailed down either way.”

  He looked around. “Well, we know now.”

  Kilroy turned his attention to Prester. His smile faded, his face becoming stiff and inexpressive. His gaze was not untouched by regret, even sorrow. “He always said that Debbie Lynn would be the death of him. He was joking then, or so I thought. Otherwise, why would he have married her?”

  Steve was taken aback. “They were husband and wife?”

  “That’s right,” Kilroy said. “What’s more natural than for a middle-aged man to fall for a young cupcake? Oldest story in the world. Only this one had a twist. The marriage was all in the line of duty, of course. For him and her. They got married because that way it was easier for each of them to keep an eye on the other. They were both CIA. She kept her maiden name for professional purposes. It suited the agency to have a married couple who could be single when they had to be.”

  Steve sighed. “A deep game. And a dirty one.”

  “Like the man said, You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  “I’d prefer not to.”

  “Amen to that, brother.”

  A thought struck Steve Ireland, lighting fires behind his hooded gaze. He stroked his square chin thoughtfully. He said, “That was some shot you made, shooting her crutch out from under her.”

  Kilroy shrugged with affected modesty. “Shucks.”

  Steve seethed. “Don’t country boy me! If you hit the crutch, you damned well could have hit her. If you didn’t, it’s because you didn’t want to. You didn’t want to kill her. You wanted me to kill her.”

  Kilroy’s bland assurance was untouched. “What’re you kicking about? She needed killing.”

  Steve said, “She could have killed me! If that knife missed—”

  “But it didn’t. Anyhow, I had the whole thing covered. If you were unable to handle her, I’d have finished her off. I just wanted to see what you had, if you had a little something extra on the ball. Which you did. ’Nuff said.”

  “You bastard!”

  “How true.” Kilroy’s smile was lopsided. “Well, that’s enough backchat. Let’s get back to work.”

  “Doing what?” Steve demanded.

  “Putting on the finishing touches.”

  “Such as?”

  “Your knife is stuck in the throat of a high-ranking CIA operative,” Kilroy pointed out in a conversational tone. “You just might want to get it out of there, especially since it’s got your fingerprints on it. I know she had it coming, and you know she had it coming, but Langley might not see it like that.”

  Steve Ireland went to the body. He stood there looking down at her, not moving.

  Kilroy’s smile was gentle, mocking. “Squeamish?”

  The other’s jaw muscles flexed. He crouched down beside the body, flipped it over and pulled out his knife. “You’re playing a deep game, Kilroy.”

  “You, too.”

  Steve shook his head. “I’m just a soldier trying to do his duty.”

  “Me, too. And him,” he said, indicating Prester.

  “We’ll take Prester out of here. It’ll confuse the opposition if they don’t know what really happened to him, if he’s dead or alive, and if he’s alive, if he was captured by the insurgents, defected to the Iranians, fled to parts unknown, or what,” said Kilroy.

  Steve looked at him from the corner of his eye. “Like the old joke says, What do you mean ‘we,’ kemo sabe?”

  Kilroy said, “You’re Army, ain’t you?”

  “I am, yes. But what are you?”

  “I’m Army, too. And as a matter of fact, I outrank you.”

  Steve grimaced. “Pulling rank is the one thing you could have done to convince me that you are Army.”

  “A big strong young fellow like you should be able to haul Prester out of here without any trouble.”

  “That an order?”

  “Well, yes, if you want to get technical about it,” Kilroy said.

  Steve hefted Prester’s body in a fireman’s carry, slinging it across his back. The body was still warm, which he found somewhat unnerving. It was heavy, too. The weight began to oppress him as he stood in the morning sun, waiting for Kilroy to finish searching Debbie Lynn’s body.

  “Nothing,” Kilroy announced, straightening up. “I didn’t expect to find anything incriminating. She was too slick for that. We’ll take her credentials and ID for future reference, though.”

  Steve asked, “What about her?”

  Kilroy said, “What do you mean, what about her?”

  “What’re we going to do about the body?”

  “Not a damned thing. Leave it for the birds. If they’ll have her.”

  They started downhill, skirting the areas torn up by the bomb. Kilroy said, “A tough fight, but we won.”

  “Who won? The Army or the Dog Team?” Steve was breathing hard from the exertion and the macabre sensation of toting a corpse.

  Kilroy cut him a sidelong glance. “Prester did some talking before he died. How much do you know?”

  Steve said, “Plenty. What’re you going to do, kill me to keep from talking?”

  “You won’t talk.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Hey, cousin, you killed Debbie Lynn. What do you think those CIA black-ops guys would do to you if they found out? They don’t know she was a traitor, and there’s no hard evidence that proves she was.”

  “I’m not worried,” Steve said. “You won’t talk, either.”

  Kilroy beamed. “See? We understand each other already.”

  “How far am I going to have to carry the body?” asked Steve.

  “Not far,” Kilroy said. “Just to the bottom of the hill. My buddy is waiting there with our ride.”

  A tan SUV sat in the hollow, Vang Bulo standing beside it, watching them descend the slope. Kilroy said, “You’re a lucky man, Irish.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “What else can happen to you? You’re already dead.”

  Steve eyed him suspiciously, wondering what he was getting at. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Kilroy, I’m still here, and very much alive. Sorry if that upsets your plans.”

  “It might upset your plans more. You see, you died up there on that hill with the rest of ODA 586. That’s how the record will read. You’ll be marked down as killed in action in the files. Steve Ireland ends here.”

  Steve stopped in his tracks. “What’re you trying to pull?”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be fixed up with a new identity,” Kilroy said. “Didn’t you ever want a job that took you to faraway places to meet exotic people—to kill them?”

  Steve said, “I have that job—Special Forces.”

  Kilroy waved his hand, as if brushing away the other’s objections. “Never mind about that. You just graduated to the big time.”

  “Meaning the Dog Team?”

  “I’d say you have every qualification.”

  Steve would have shaken his head if Prester’s body hadn’t been in the way. Hard jawed, he said, “Don’t mistake luck for skill. It was just blind chance that kept me from getting caught in the blast with the others. Luck of the draw. It could have been anyone on the team, it just happened to be me.”

  “You know what Napoleon said: ‘Find me the generals that are lucky,’” Kilroy reminded him.

  “I’m no general,” Steve said.

  “No, and you’re not going to be. Guys like us don’t make general. We’re field men—specialists—and you don’t make the top rank that way.”


  “I’m not like you, Kilroy.”

  “Nobody’s perfect. But like I said, you’ve got talent.”

  “I can see how the Dog Team got its name, if the others are anything like you,” Steve Ireland said, “because mister, in my book you’re a real, gold-plated son of a—”

  “Don’t say it.” Kilroy wagged a finger in the other’s face. “That’d be insubordination.”

  Steve resumed the descent, muttering under his breath. The sooner he was rid of his burden, the better. The burden of Prester’s corpse, that is. The burden of Kilroy’s influence, he suspected, would not be so easily shed.

  The slope leveled out into the bowl. They crossed to Vang Bulo and the SUV. The Ugandan reached out with a terrible gentleness, helping to load Prester’s body into the back of the vehicle. Up front, the radio was on. It was a scanner designed to carry military and police wavebands. The speaker squawked noisily, detailing an armed clash that had broken out in Azif when a Sunni mob had tried to cross the Coalition’s protective cordon around the Shiite quarter of the town.

  Steve Ireland said, “Sounds like a hot one. It could break out into a local civil and religious war at any moment.”

  Kilroy nodded. “That’s one thing about being in the Dog Team—you never lack for work.” His eyes got a faraway look.

  So many foes, so few bullets . . . The Dog Team will return!

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  Copyright © 2005 by William W. Johnstone

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  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.