“What are you going to do?”
“My job,” I said, shoving Justin back into the trailer in front of me, “is to end this thing. Now go.”
Chapter 29
I made Justin sit against the wall.
“You ever want to make it back to San Jose in the vertical position, you better start explaining just what in the hell is going on here, Justin. Because I’ve had a long night, and I’m not in the mood.”
“We’re training at the camp.”
“Training for what? The coming alien invasion? I’m a cop, Justin. NYPD. I know what happened to Eardley. How he didn’t die in the crash back in ’07. How his old buddy Haber is here running a paramilitary operation, and decided Eardley should take a dive off the side of a building. What are you guys? CIA?”
Justin looked at me.
I took a chance. “Look, man. I have no stake in this, except that I tried to solve a murder and now people keep shooting at me. But I was just at the Pentagon, asking how this guy turned up dead again, and the brass are all over this. The secret is out.”
Justin grunted, so I continued. “And this little training camp is gonna look pretty strange when the powers that be start sniffing around. I wouldn’t be surprised if Haber took that chopper and flew away. If not, I’m gonna wait here with your weapon to greet him in style. But if you tell me what’s going on, I can help you.”
He exhaled and slumped down. “Give me a cigarette, man. They’re in my bag. I’ll tell you the whole thing. This mission is cursed.”
I lit his Marlboro for him with his Zippo and placed it between his lips.
“Okay, Justin. Now, from the very beginning,” I said.
He took a breath.
“It all started in Iraq. On the night of May 1, 2007, we ran a raid from the Special Forces command in Balad up north all the way down south. Near the shore of the Persian Gulf in Basra.”
“In Eardley’s C-130?”
“Yeah. It was a big CIA-run operation. There were Rangers, Green Berets, and SEALs. I was just a weatherman and forward observer.”
“Weatherman?”
“An Air Force weatherman. They bring us out on potentially longer raids to read the sky, just like the guys on Channel 6. Weather’s important to pilots and planes. Like life-and-death important.”
I nodded.
“Go on.”
“Anyway, so the top special operators, mostly veteran SEALs, were real jazzed about grabbing some bigwig al-Qaeda asshole they got intel on, so they brought all the toys way down there. Little bird choppers, some Humvees, some dirt bikes. There were about thirty of us altogether.
“So the hot dogs do a recon, to suss out a plan while a contingent of Rangers and B-level folks like myself are supposed to hang back at this remote staging area, as backup in case some heavy-duty shit goes down. While all the hotshots were on surveillance for hours, us peewees were sitting around shooting the shit. And this one Ranger, this guy Toporski, goes exploring on the outskirts of this remote craphole suburb of Basra. After an hour, he radioes us to come running because somebody took a shot at him.
“We run over there, and there’s another shot from this hut’s window, and we light it up and kick in the door ready to grease Osama, who we hadn’t found yet. But it was better than that. A million times better. It was the mother lode.”
Chapter 30
I still hadn’t heard the chopper coming back but knew it could return at any second. I nudged Justin to keep him talking.
“Back in 2003 when we came in, the week before we got to Baghdad, a national bank was knocked over by the guards who were supposed to watch it. Three hundred million in cash and gold. Well, I don’t know how that loot got there to Basra in some shithole of a hut, but that’s where it was.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Treasure hunting in Basra?
“There it was in a locked room under a tarp. There were two pallets. On one was millions of dollars in Federal Reserve US hundred-dollar bills, and on the other pallet were stacks of gold bars up to the waist. There were 105 of them in all. Each one twenty-seven pounds of pure gold, with the word Engelhard stamped into them. I’ve seen a few things, but when Toporski pulled that tarp, that took the cake. I mean, it was just…
“Right then and there, we decide to take it. Don’t tell the hotshots. Screw them. All six of us—including Haber and Eardley, our pilot—grab it all, load it into the Humvee. We had to take out the seats. The truck was scraping the ground. Then we hauled ass back to the plane.”