The Return Of Dog Team Read online

  Not that he was actually standing on it. He didn’t want to be outlined against the bare backdrop of the empty sky. He crouched down, his form blending in with the humped masses of bulldozed earth.

  At this hour, Azif was mostly dark, with few lights. Every now and then, sporadic bursts of shooting could be heard coming from the town. They seemed random, unselective. A crackle of gunfire would sound, blazing up and just as swiftly falling silent. There would be a lull. Then inevitably, some new burst of fire would break out in a different quarter, only to repeat the pattern.

  Every now and then, a set or two of vehicle headlights could be seen driving in and around town, flashing into and out of sight in the open spaces of traffic squares. None of them came within half a mile of the graveyard, though.

  The wind blew, rattling the spidery limbs of bare, dead trees. There was the sound of running water, a trickle of which spilled through a nearby ditch. A small fan of smudged yellow light showed distantly in the southern sky where the moon shone through a rent in the clouds.

  Moonlight picked out the approach of Kilroy’s contact crossing a field north of the graveyard and closing in on it. The figure flitted through a gap in the wall, entering the site. Kilroy no longer perched atop the tomb mound. He’d eased down from his observation post, dropping silently into the graveyard.

  The graveyard scene was quite different when one experienced it directly instead of merely looking down at it from on high. The top of the tomb mound showed the depressions and ridges all laid out below. When one was in them, the big picture vanished, replaced by the tighter, more immediate view of the near surroundings. You could be in a crater, and there could be a gang of cutthroats lurking in the next one, and you wouldn’t even know it unless they made some betraying noises.

  Kilroy was armed with an M4 machine gun. It was short and snouty with heavy firepower, well fitted to tight, close spots like the graveyard. He’d long since gotten his night vision, but even so, it was tough going. Moonlight threw exposed areas into bold relief, but shadowed places were coal black. Shadows were welcome to those who wanted to hide in them.

  Kilroy stepped into the open, coming face to face with his contact. He held his weapon with the muzzle pointing down at the ground. He stood on one side of a crater facing north, while the other stood on the north side of the crater facing south. The crater was eight feet deep and fifteen feet across at its widest part.

  A hunter needs to know where the game is. The Dog Team apparatus had sources in the unlikeliest places. A chance had led to acquiring an important asset deep in the enemy camp. A high-level person in the Akkad crime clan had been turned and was supplying invaluable information and intelligence on the inner workings of that secretive, murderous organization.

  Now that vital informant stood on the far side of a crater in the Graveyard of Martyrs, meeting with Kilroy. Moonlight shone down on and into his face, revealing his identity: Jafar Akkad.

  Jafar Akkad, roly-poly younger brother of Hassani Akkad, leader of the crime clan. In Azif’s criminal society, Jafar was known as “The Whale,” though no one ever called him that to his face. Because he was fat faced and seemingly jolly, he was better liked than his notoriously ill-tempered older sibling. Hassani may have ordered the executions, but Jafar was the one who saw that they were carried out. He accompanied the murder squads on their rounds just for fun. Every now and then, he liked to go out and cut a throat or blow somebody’s brains out, just to keep his hand in. People excused his violence, blaming it on Hassani. Their attitude was that Jafar was just carrying out orders, an obedient and dutiful younger brother.

  He looked fat—was fat—but he moved pretty well. Kilroy had barely heard him making his way in the dark to the meeting place.

  Jafar had no use for Americans, but he had even less use for Hassani. He’d long since tired of the role of dutiful kid brother. Hassani was a permanent bar to his ambitions. With Hassani gone, Jafar could move into the top slot.

  Jafar had made a tentative approach in that direction, but the assassin he’d hired had fallen short of taking down Hassani. The hireling had been killed in the attempt, leaving Jafar secure in the belief that his authorship of the plot was safe from detection. He began working up another plot.

  The failed killer had had links to American intelligence agents, keeping them well informed about Jafar’s machinations. The Americans, like Jafar, could only heave a sigh of relief that the assassin had been killed before he could be made to speak of his dealings with them.

  In due course, Jafar was confronted with the knowledge that the Americans had in their possession damning facts and evidence of his plan to murder his brother. It was a carrot-and-stick approach to recruitment. The stick was the threat to reveal Jafar’s treachery to Hassani. The carrot was the admission that they were not unsympathetic to his ultimate aim of eliminating and replacing his brother.

  Here was the basis for a working arrangement. One hand would wash the other. Jafar would supply the Americans with inside information about Hassani’s criminal operations, his kidnapping rings, and his alliances with militia leader Waleed Tewfiq and the Iranians. In return, they would provide the solution to his Hassani problem and rig it in a way that no suspicion would attach to Jafar.

  It was Jafar who’d supplied the information about tonight’s midnight meeting between the gunrunners and Akkad gang members, just as he’d previously mentioned several other smaller, similar contraband operations that had been hijacked by Kilroy and Vang Bulo.

  Now, by prearrangement, Jafar and Kilroy met in the graveyard. No doubt that Jafar had come alone. He didn’t dare risk having any of the gang, not even his own loyalists, discover his dealings with one of the hated Americans—especially a first-class bastard such as Kilroy.

  Jafar was more right than he dared dream possible. Kilroy was a first-class bastard. He was the illegitimate son of the long-dead Terry Kovak, one of the top guns in the subterranean history of the Dog Team.

  Jafar looked around at his surroundings, his expression bleak. “A fine place you pick for a meeting!”

  Kilroy said, “What’s the matter—afraid of ghosts?”

  “Of unexploded artillery shells. There are said to be many of them in this battlefield of a graveyard. That is why it is so studiously avoided,” Jafar said with a wintry smile.

  They spoke in Arabic. Kilroy could communicate in several languages. Nothing fancy, but enough to get his basic points across. Arabic was a language in which he’d become fairly fluent over the last decade, having carried out numerous assignments in the Middle East during that time.

  Jafar said, “I have done what you wanted. When will you do what I want?”

  “Soon,” Kilroy said.

  “Soon,” Jafar echoed, not without bitterness. “Always soon. I grow weary of this soon. When does soon become now?”

  “Soon,” Kilroy said. “When Hassani moves The Package. When will that be?”

  “Any day now. Tomorrow night, or the night after that. No later,” Jafar said. “The Iranians are putting pressure on him to deliver.”

  Kilroy said, “After tonight, there’ll be more pressure.”

  Jafar paused. “It went well, then.”

  “For me, it did. Not for the Iranians.”

  “What does it matter? They were dogs.”

  “There’s dogs, and then there’s dogs,” Kilroy said, smirking, thinking, Dog Team dogs, sucker.

  Jafar frowned, irked. “I fail to take your meaning.”

  “Let it pass. When Hassani moves The Package, I want to know.”

  “No more than I. I chafe, I ache with the need to be relieved of the pestilential presence of my overbearing brother. Each day of delay becomes ever more intolerable to me.”

  Kilroy showed a wolfish grin. Jafar bridled, said, “You find something amusing in this exchange?”

  Kilroy avoided the question. “You hate hard, Jafar. I respect that. Because I’m the same way.”

  The other got huffy. “
You flatter yourself, my friend.”

  “It’s not flattery, and I’m not your friend.”

  “How true. On that note of agreement, let us part then.”

  “You know how to contact me. When the time comes, see that you do,” Kilroy said. “Otherwise, I’ll come after you.”

  “Ha ha,” Jafar said, “I laugh at your threats.”

  “It’s not just my neck on the line. It’s yours, too. Betray me, and your betrayal will be made known to Hassani. This is a one-way trip, and the train has already left the station. There’s no turning back now. Hassani dies, or you die.”

  “When he comes out, you’ll know. See that you don’t make a botch of it.”

  “If that’s all that’s worrying you, you can start trying out for size Hassani’s chair now,” Kilroy said.

  Jafar permitted himself a small self-satisfied smile. “Time enough for that after the funeral.”

  Kilroy said, “The next time we meet, you’ll be the head of the Akkad family.”

  The oily smile slipped away. “There will be no next time. Such meetings are dangerous. In the future, should the occasion arise, we will communicate at several removes,” Jafar said.

  Kilroy said, “Okay.”

  There was nothing more to be said. The meeting was over. Jafar readied himself to withdraw.

  “You can tell your friend to come out now,” he said.

  Kilroy played dumb. “What friend is that?”

  “The one hiding behind the mound in back of you.”

  “You’re imagining things.”

  Jafar bobbed his head in a mock bow. He took a few steps backward, into the shadows. He stepped behind a mound and was lost to sight.

  Kilroy faded back, too. No sense in standing out in the open, making a target of himself. He slipped into a gap between two humps of earth, plowed up ridges. Something touched his shoulder.

  He started, looking over his shoulder to see what had him. A skeletal white hand, long torn from its grave, jutted outward from the top of a dirt pile, reaching for him. Kilroy stepped away from it, thinking, Not yet, bony boy. You don’t have me yet.

  Several minutes passed. Down on the flat beyond the north graveyard wall, an engine started up. A car drove away, bumping along a dirt road, guided only by its parking lights. It made for Azif in a roundabout way, swinging a wide circle out before curving back in toward the city.

  Kilroy and Vang Bulo came out in the open, the latter holding a machine gun and emerging from behind the very mound which Jafar had indicated as the hiding place for a lurking accomplice.

  Vang Bulo said, “He’s pretty good. He knew I was there, and I swear I didn’t make a sound.”

  “He’s sneaky,” Kilroy said. “He figured that if he were in my place, he’d have a backup there, and that I’d do the same thing.”

  “He came alone, though. I checked.”

  “He’s motivated. He wants Hassani dead, bad.”

  “That’s brotherly love for you, eh?”

  Kilroy said, “I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child myself.”

  Vang Bulo said, “You trust him?”

  “Only where it comes to killing his brother. But that’s enough. Like I said, he’s motivated. Besides,” Kilroy added, “I’ve got something better than trust working for me: technology. I don’t have to take his word about where The Package is. Thanks to the locator implant, I can see for myself. If Jafar says The Package is at X and the locator shows him at Y, I’ll know he’s lying.

  “Like the saying goes: Trust but verify.”

  The two began making their way toward the south side of the graveyard. Kilroy said in an aside, “He thinks that there are unexploded shells in the cemetery.”

  Vang Bulo’s steps did not falter. “I didn’t see any.”

  “It’s the ones you don’t see that you have to look out for.”

  Both men became more careful about where they placed their steps. They passed the mound with the half-buried stone tomb and followed a winding path down a long slope that leveled out on weedy, open fields. The SUV was hidden in a stand of trees in a hollow. They went to it and drove away, going to Greentown.

  The scout car had been hidden earlier in a safe place where no one else would find it and where it would be ready when they needed it.

  When would that be? Soon.

  Four

  There was nothing green about Greentown. It took its name from the Green Zone, the citadel at the heart of Baghdad where the executive Iraqi government and the Coalition authority were housed. The Green Zone was supposed to be a safe area, but in Iraq today, nowhere is safe from attacks by sniper, mortar, or rocket fire.

  Greentown was located south of the highway between Azif and Border Base Foxtrot and was closer to town than to the base. It was a depot and warehouse complex that had been built along an east-west rail line that stretched nearly from the border to Baghdad. Azif was a stop on that line.

  In the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the transportation system, like much of the rest of the infrastructure, had gone to rot and ruin. The depot complex had fallen into disuse and was long abandoned when victorious Coalition forces chose the site as a linchpin of the provincial reconstruction effort.

  At the time, there had been big plans for rebuilding and renewing Azif and the surrounding area. U.S. planners believed a Sunni stronghold so near to the Iranian border had vital strategic and tactical value. That had been early on, when optimism about the long-term American presence in Iraq had been at its height. The theory was that Azif would continue to be a bulwark of anti-Iranian resistance, which it did. But it was even more a center of rabid anti-Western resistance, with Coalition forces the focus of Iraqi ire.

  Greentown was where the provincial reconstruction effort had set up headquarters in anticipation of a lengthy stay. The previously existing complex had been pressed into use by the NGOs, the nongovernmental organizations hired to rebuild and renew Azif. There were civilian administrators, inspectors, regulators, and interpreters. There were contractors, construction gangs, welders, riveters, heavy equipment operators. Other contractors provided food, drinking water, and housing facilities.

  The complex was divided into an administrative area, a living area, and a work area. The administrative area was set up in one of the old warehouses. Another section of the compound housed the construction effort, including the heavy-duty equipment, yellow-painted earthmoving machines, bulldozers, backhoes, cranes, derricks, and flatbed and dump trucks. The living area consisted mainly of some prefab barracks buildings and a cluster of mobile homes. The compound was ringed with bombproof concrete slabs and layers of barbed wire and chain-link, barbed wire–topped fences.

  A prime target for insurgents, terrorists, and crooks, the site was guarded by both a private security firm and a large detachment of Coalition troops.

  The train line was unable to recover under Coalition hands. Sections of track were buried under dirt and sand. Rails were rusting, bent, or just plain gone. It was easier to bring supplies up from Basra in the south by truck convoy. Easier, but not safer. Insurgents just loved to target those convoys.

  Military personnel generally lived in the barracks, while civilian permanent party contract employees were largely housed in the mobile-home area. Others were boarded in the Visitors’ Quarters building, a civilian-operated four-story building with rounded edges and a flat roof. Its shape reminded Kilroy of a metal Band-Aid box, a resemblance heightened by an unfortunate paint job the color of a flesh-colored bandage.

  But the place was relatively clean and convenient, and Kilroy and Vang Bulo had taken rooms. It was a convenient place to rest for a while between missions while they were operating in the area.

  Dull predawn grayness showed in the sky when Kilroy and Vang Bulo came straggling in to the Visitors’ Quarters lobby and dragged themselves to their rooms. They each had a single room on the third floor. The rooms were small, basic cubicles.

  Kilroy let himself into his room, swi
tching on the overhead light. There was a cot, a night table with a lamp, a gray metal double-doored clothes locker, a square-topped table and a straight-backed, armless chair.

  Kilroy peeled off his clothes and crawled between the sheets, hitting the sack. He was dog tired. He was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  When he awoke, the room was filled with heat and light. It was day. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, placing his feet on the floor and sitting up. The thought came to him that he ought to use the locator to check on the status of The Package.

  He stifled the thought, putting it firmly from his mind. It could wait until after he’d showered. The world wasn’t going to go to hell in the time it would take him to take a shower. And if it did, let it.

  He donned a bathrobe and a pair of flip-flops, grabbed his shaving bag by its loop handle, and went down the hall to the shower room. The shaving kit was hefty, weighty. He set it down on a nearby shelf within reach of the shower stall. He kept the plastic curtain open a crack so he could keep an eye on the kit while he was showering.

  Showered and shaved, he returned to his room. He put the shaving kit on the bed and opened it. The leather bag held a can of shaving cream, soap, a razor, and some deodorant. It also held a snub-nosed .38 revolver and a device resembling a video game console.

  He took out the device. It was about the size and shape of a paperback book. The face was divided into an inset screen and a set of buttons that included directional arrows and a numerical keypad.

  He switched on the power. A pinhead-sized light glowed green. The machine hummed faintly. The screen lit up. The handset was loaded with a video game, a military-themed tank combat game.

  He sat down on the bed with legs crossed, back propped up against the wall. He fiddled with the game, playing it for five minutes. As always, it took hold of his competitive instincts, and he played to win, grinning when he destroyed an enemy tank and frowning when his tank was hit. It took no small amount of willpower to switch mental gears and decouple his attention from the game.