Revenge of the Dog Team Page 3

  Quentin made a perfect front man, exploiting his contacts with a clique of civilian political appointees in the Pentagon’s procurement department to land Brinker some nice fat contracts. Brinker’s products proved to be of the same quality as the bad paper Quentin had been pushing at the brokerage house: defective, when not actually nonexistent.

  The sweet ride had hit a speed bump when Brinker landed a deal to supply weapons to Iraqi and Afghani police forces that were being trained and equipped by the U.S. Army. The company couldn’t just stiff the Army; they had to deliver something. Operating through some accommodating defense ministers in a tiny Balkan state who served as front men for the transaction, they bought a quantity of arms and ammunition from the People’s Republic of China. The matériel, surplus equipment left over from the Korean War, was transshipped to Afghanistan and Iraq. So haphazard and slipshod was the operation, that much of the delivery was still packaged in cases bearing the PRC’s original labeling and Red Star insignia. The pistols and rifles were too rusty and antiquated to ever actually hit a target; that is, assuming that the cartridges could even be made to fire.

  Brinker might have gotten away with it at that, considering that their high-level civilian friends and co-confederates in the Pentagon were equally minded to sweep the mess under the rug and make it go away.

  They hadn’t reckoned on the tenacity and single-minded devotion to duty of one Colonel Millard Sterling. Sterling was career Army and posted to the same procurement department in the Pentagon that had brokered the Brinker arms deal. He might have looked more like an accountant than a warrior, but in his way he was a strike trooper straight down the line.

  The contract had been granted despite his opposition, thanks to the influence wielded by political appointees, and he was determined to expose the whole rotten mess. He couldn’t be bluffed, bought, or scared. Pressure came down from above, giving him the time-honored bureaucratic screw job, relegating him to the Pentagon’s version of Siberia and career limbo. Sterling stubbornly kept at it, building a file of relevant documents and affadavits, collecting a damning paper trail that led straight back to the malefactors. He kept going through channels, filing reports, bombarding the higher-ups with the naked facts. Worse, some officials were starting to take him seriously.

  That’s when Colonel Millard Sterling was found dead in the garage of his modest home in a Virginia suburb, his head virtually blown off by a blast from a shotgun clutched in his hands.

  Suicide, his detractors said. It proved he’d been delusional from the start, causing him to construct a paranoid fantasy about alleged irregularities in the Brinker arms deal and, ultimately, take his own life. His grieving family swore he’d never owned a shotgun, but that was sloughed off as the understandable blindness of relatives unable to come to grips with the fact of their loved one’s self-destruction.

  The Brinker affair seemed to have died stillborn, only to be revived some months later when a long-term congressman and high-level member of the House Armed Services Committee involved with military procurement was arrested by the FBI in connection with an unrelated bribery investigation.

  Under intensive grilling and with the threat of a lengthy prison term, the representative spilled his guts, unloading his inside account of a massive criminal conspiracy between defense contractors, legislators, and federal officials to defraud the United States government.

  Among those implicated were members of the Brinker board of directors. The company went bust and some of its officers went to jail, but not Quentin Durwood III. Having learned his lessons since his brokerage house days, he’d been careful not to leave his tracks on the dirty dealings that had gone down during his tenure as Brinker’s CEO. His accomplices who’d been nabbed pointed the finger at him, but the uncorroborated testimony of convicted felons was inadmissable as evidence.

  He looked guilty, was guilty, but the government couldn’t prove it in court, so he walked away from the Brinker scandal and collapse free and clear.

  So far. Investigations were still continuing, and there was always the chance that prosecutors might unearth some new angle to nail him, though as yet they hadn’t come up with anything particularly promising.

  One item that had come up during the probing indicated that Quentin had been complicit and possibly instrumental in arranging through party or parties unknown the murder of Colonel Sterling. The information was based on hearsay evidence of a confidential informant, and was too thin and tenuous to justify the expenditure of time, money, and manpower, so it was never followed up.

  One of the federal agents who was privy to this lead was an army veteran, a former military policeman who maintained contact with former colleagues who were still on active duty, including a high-ranking officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. The G-man passed the information along to his buddy.

  In due course, it came to the attention of an army special investigating unit whose specialty lay in investigating such matters. Due to national security concerns, its name was unknown to all but a few. Suffice it to say that the SIU had considerable resources behind it, including sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and communications interception capabilities.

  They started digging, unhindered by an excess of red tape or concern for the legal niceties. The lead was authenticated and verified. Durwood Quentin III had indeed contracted for Colonel Sterling’s death. This was proved to a moral certainty.

  Due to issues of due process, jurisdiction, and some of the extralegal means used to acquire said proof, irrefutable though it was, it could never be admitted into a court of law. Quentin was guilty of an army officer’s murder and legally untouchable.

  Which is where Steve Ireland came in.

  Few if any nations will openly admit to using assassination as an instrument of policy. Most if not all of them use it; they just don’t care to admit it, because to do so lifts the curtain a little too much on how the world really works.

  The United States government has publicly proclaimed a prohibition against state-sanctioned assassination of foreign political leaders. Since the terror attacks of 9/11, that position has become somewhat equivocal in theory; in practice, no official in any governmental agency or clandestine service wants to sign their name to documents initiating such a project. That doesn’t mean that the deed isn’t done; it just means that nobody wants to leave a paper trail signing off on it.

  The military’s job is to make war. That capability is the core of deterrence and national security. The individual service member must, if necessary, be ready, willing, and able to kill the enemy. Whether that function is carried out in bloody hand-to-hand combat or by the push of a button to launch a missile, is unimportant. What matters is the intent.

  Assassination is warfare by other means. That is why the Dog Team was born.

  In the shadowy half-world of clandestine (“black”) operations, the Dog Team is one of the blackest of all black ops. Knowledge of its existence is classified Above Top Secret and restricted to a select few. Theirs is an awesome responsibility, one not given or taken lightly.

  The Dog Team is the U.S. Army’s assassination arm, its killer elite. Its members are authorized to “neutralize,” that is, kill, persons whose elimination is deemed vital to the national security. This includes enemies both foreign and domestic.

  Terrorists, spies, and traitors are not the only foes. Sometimes, the threat comes in strange and unfamiliar guises. Many and oddly assorted are those who seek to make covert war on the republic. Sinister political cabals, corporate cartels, and organized criminal elements conspire, singly or in combination, in a ceaseless effort to suborn the Constitution and seize supreme power by any means necessary.

  They may be beyond the reach of the law—but not of the Dog Team.

  Brinker Defense Systems had cheated the Pentagon out of many millions of dollars. This in itself was not unusual. The multibillion-dollar defense budget has long been viewed by many unscrupulous plotters as a cash cow to be milked by hook or
crook. That’s a given, just part of the way the system works. If every public-and private-sector chiseler who defrauded the U.S. taxpayer was marked for liquidation, the slaughter would be prodigious.

  By setting in motion the murder of Colonel Millard Sterling, an honorable officer who was doing his duty, Brinker prexy Durwood Quentin III had crossed a threshold and entered the Dog Team’s gunsights.

  Team member Steve Ireland had drawn the sanction. Now somebody else was trying to horn in on the game.

  Who?

  Less than an hour earlier, Quentin’s Cadillac had rolled into The Booby Hatch’s parking lot. The Crown Victoria that had been following it continued southbound to the next intersection and turned left into a side street.

  A few cars behind, Steve Ireland’s sedan cruised through the cross street and kept on going. Glancing left, he saw the Crown Vic’s red taillights come winking on as it braked to a halt in the middle of the side street. In his rearview mirror, he saw the vehicle make an illegal K-turn back onto the main drag, so that it was pointing northbound toward the club.

  At the next light, Steve turned right, then right again, putting him northbound on a street running parallel to the one where the club was located. He followed it for a couple of blocks, made another right, then another, emerging southbound on the boulevard a long block above The Booby Hatch.

  Pulling in at the curb a couple of car lengths past the corner, he parked the car and killed the lights. Rolled up the windows and switched off the engine.

  The overhead dome light was switched off so that it wouldn’t light up when the car doors were opened. Steve got out of the car and locked it. It was on the opposite side of the street from the club, a good hard stone’s throw away. The neighborhood was pretty crummy, but there wasn’t much danger of the car being broken into or stolen, not on The Booby Hatch’s Mob-protected turf.

  Reaching under the left side of his utility vest, he surreptitiously adjusted the flat pistol tucked butt-out in the top of his pants against his hip so that it sat the way he liked it. On a hot night like this when everybody was wearing lightweight summer clothes, wedging the gun in his waistband was less conspicuous than wearing a shoulder rig or clip-on belt holster.

  He made sure his T-shirt covered the rod. It would slow his draw, but life is trade-offs. The flap of the utility vest reached down below below his hip and added to the concealment.

  He strolled along the sidewalk, toward the club. The economy might be in the toilet, but you’d never know it by the mass of parked cars crowding The Booby Hatch’s lot. The witching hour was near, tomorrow was a work day, but the joint was jumping. It just goes to show people find the money for what they really want, Steve thought.

  The building throbbed with the muffled beat of electronically amplified, bass-heavy dance music that thudded like war drums in the night. Loud as it was, it couldn’t drown out the buzzing and crackling of the neon sign that spelled out the club’s name over the entrance. The lurid red glare splashed the front and sidewalk like the blaze of a burning building.

  Knots of men milled around, both blue-collar working stiffs and suit-and-tie office drones. From the noise they were making and the seething restlessness of their movements, it was obvious that more than a few of them had a load on.

  Steve kept on walking. Further down the block, he spotted the Crown Vic parked on the same side of the street as the club. It was empty.

  Two attributes his trade demanded were sharp eyes and good night vision. He spotted a man standing on the corner of the side street where the Crown Vic had made a K-turn. The man stood in a patch of gloom, but the street lamps were so bright that there wasn’t much shadow to be found.

  A big guy, with short dark hair and a mustache. The guy from the Crown Vic. He was talking to a woman. Steve couldn’t make out too much detail, but from what he could see of her figure and how much skin she was showing, it was a sure bet that she wasn’t a recruiter from the local mission making a midnight run to save souls. Their heads were close together, but their body language said that they weren’t a couple, at least not in the usual sense of the term.

  Steve checked for traffic, turned, stepped down off the curb, and crossed the street, angling back toward the club. It was easy to melt into the swarm of drunks and loudmouths clustered on the sidewalk and in the parking lot. The neon sign buzzed, the red glare seethed and flickered, the electro-beat was a physical thing that vibrated through the pavement.

  Nobody paid any attention to Steve. Covering behind an SUV, he looked for the couple on the corner.

  They must have come to a parting of the ways, because the woman was walking along the sidewalk toward the club, while the man hung back on the corner, idling in place. She moved like she felt right at home, striding boldly, confidently, breasts bobbing, hips swaying, long legs flashing. As she neared, Steve got a better look at her. She was the kind of woman used to being looked at, and worked hard at it.

  She had long hair and wore a dark, low-cut sleeveless top, a skirt whose hem barely reached the top of her thighs, and knee-high shiny white high-heeled boots. As she closed in on the club, the click-clacking of her high heels against the pavement beat out a percussive rhythm that made itself heard over the clamor of the dance music, the buzzing sound, and the hangers-on crowding around in front of the building.

  The loiterers started buzzing louder than the sign as they became aware of her presence. Heads swiveled around so fast to take a look at her that some of their owners risked whiplash. Eyes bulged or narrowed, depending on their owners. Gawkers nudged their buddies to get an eyeful of the newcomer.

  She was an eyeful, all right. In her high-heeled boots, she stood about five-nine. Her red-hair was cut in bangs across her forehead and hung down at the sides to mid-chest level. Her hair was cherry red, and from its uniform straightness and the glossy artificiality of it, it looked like a wig.

  Her skin was bone-white, her features bold. Wide dark eyes were ringed with enough mascara to give them a raccoon aspect; a bold, red-lipped mouth turned up at the corners, though not necessarily in a smile. She was broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, wide-hipped, and long-legged. Her breasts were strictly from implants, and the cosmetic surgeon hadn’t stinted on the silicone on the day they were installed.

  Catcalls and whistles, hoots and hollers vented among the loiterers as she moved among their midst. A car was pulling out of the parking lot, causing her to pause to let it pass. Steve used the opportunity to take a couple of pictures of her with his cell phone camera for future reference. The street was almost as well lit up as the crowd, allowing the camera to catch a pretty sharp image.

  The car braked to a halt, blocking the sidewalk. The driver’s-side window rolled down and the driver, a curly-haired fat-faced guy, stuck out his head. He must have known her, because he called familiarly to her. “Ginger! Hey, Ginger, it’s me, Sal! C’mere, doll!”

  Ignoring him, Ginger walked around the back of the car, making her way toward the club’s front entrance. Sal rolled down the passenger-side window and leaned across the front seat, continuing to call to her. “C’mon, let’s go for a ride! Ginger!!”

  Wriggling eel-like through the knots of males, not looking back, she kept on her hip-swaying way. With practiced ease, she avoided the clutching hands of guys trying to cop a feel.

  “Ginger, Ginger!”

  Another car was trying to get out of the lot, but Sal’s car was blocking the exit. The driver of the second car leaned on the horn hard. Sal gave him the finger and shouted what the other could do to himself. The second car had four guys inside; a couple of them opened the doors and started to get out. Sal saw them coming. His car lurched forward into the street, just as suddenly slamming to a halt to avoid plowing into an oncoming car.

  The new car held down its blaring horn for a long time as it sailed northward on the boulevard. Sal punched the gas, tires squealing as he turned left, crossing the centerline of the road and bulleting southbound.

  His taill
ights were vanishing red dots by the time the guys in the second car climbed back inside, laughing and crowing that they’d sure showed him.

  The press of male bodies grew thicker as Ginger neared the club’s front door. A wise guy grabbed her right breast and squeezed it clown-like, like he was honking a horn. She leaned into him and she must have worked a knee, because the joker went white-faced and open-mouthed as he crumpled up like a crushed beer can.

  Ginger brushed past him and disappeared inside the club. The guy she’d kneed lay curled up on his side on the pavement, gasping for breath, clutching himself with both hands between his legs. His face had gone from white to green.

  Those nearby, including the guy’s buddies, thought that was funny as hell and stood around yukking it up. They didn’t think it was so funny a moment later when a club bouncer came barreling out the front door, looking more than ready to do some bouncing.

  He told the joker’s buddies to get him the hell out of there. They hauled the disabled man to his feet, holding him up with their hands hooked under his arms. He was still using both hands to hold his privates. His pals half carried, half dragged him across the lot and loaded him into their parked car.

  The beefy bouncer stood there with meaty fists on his hips, watching them as they drove away. He went back inside the club.

  Steve had paid little attention to the distraction, focusing on the tail man, the Crown Vic driver still standing on the corner. Steve stood where he could watch the other without being seen by him. Five minutes passed before the other made a move, starting up the street toward the club. He made a beeline for the entrance. Steve got a good look at him.

  The tail man was big, with a bodybuilder’s physique, one that had been augmented by megadoses of steroids. He would have made the club bouncer look modest-sized by comparison. Fortyish, he wore his dark hair cropped close to the scalp, as close as a three-day beard. His blocky head seemed as wide as it was long. His brows were thick dark vertical lines; he had a thick black mustache of the type that Steve for some reason always associated with firefighters and cops.