THE CONTRACTOR Read online

  “So do you think they’re gonna come a’lookin?”

  “No idea,” I answered. But that really wasn’t the truth. I knew somebody would be looking. They weren’t going to leave us behind the lines. They may have thought they were looking for remains, but I knew they were on their way. We just had to keep moving. So move we did, trudging across sand, climbing over rock piles, following dry stream beds, taking rest in whatever shade we could find.

  Big problem number one: no water. A person can only survive about three days without water, so that really became a priority. Both of us had nearly starved to death several times in our sordid pasts, so that wasn’t a worry at the moment. As a matter of fact, if we could have eaten, we probably wouldn’t have; digestion takes much needed water from your system. It would be better to forgo the food.

  There were snowcapped mountains visible to the north. It was likely that rivers or streams ran from those frigid peaks, and there was some chance we would find them eventually. That would work, as long as “eventually” was sooner than three days.

  Big problem number two: we could hear vehicles. I was under no illusion it was the Cavalry coming to pick us up. Too soon, and too far. Our Cavalry would be dropping in from the air if anything, so these vehicles were gonna be full of unshaved, cigarette-smoking, AK-carrying soldiers ready to do a little snipe hunting. It was time to make like badgers and burrow.

  We ran like we were being chased by divorce lawyers and tucked ourselves away in the hillside that rimmed our little piece of hell. I jammed myself into a crevasse between two huge slabs of rock. Merlin disappeared like a cockroach does when the lights go on. Our ears strained to hear the vehicles approach.

  They roared across the valley floor below us and continued on their way. Luck was with us; we hadn’t been seen. When all was silent, I called to Jim.

  “You think we’re clear?”

  “Think so.”

  I wrangled my way out of the rocks and looked around for my compadre. He appeared out of the rocks several yards above me.

  “How the hell did you get way up there?”

  Merlin smiled. “Don’t know. Wasn’t motivated to die today, and suddenly I was a friggin’ billy goat.”

  I had to laugh.

  “How many did you count?”

  Merlin thought for a moment, rubbed the bristles that were once the hairs on the back of his head, and told me, “Three.”

  We agreed there had been three small vehicles, perhaps jeeps. More than likely a search party looking for the wreckage. We were good for the moment, but soon the Iranians would discover bodies missing from the accident scene. They’d determine direction from footprints in the sand. They’d want to hunt down the survivors—and that meant us. It was time to double-time.

  We did the Airborne shuffle for what must have been hours, following the sun’s trek across the sky to the west. Completely exhausted, and seemingly out of sweat, we dropped ourselves down in the elongated shadow of a huge boulder. I thought we had been much closer to the mountains than we actually were. They had looked near, but as the hours passed, we didn’t seem to get any closer. We had to take a moment to rest and allow the sweat to dry. With evening approaching, the temps would drop, and sweaty clothes would lead to hypothermia for sure.

  “Those bastards are still a few miles away, buddy,” I told Merlin, who was panting heavily.

  “Oh, goody,” he responded sarcastically.

  We sat in silence, our heart rates slowing down a bit at a time. Then we both heard the sound: a river! Motivation surged through our veins, and we both jumped to our well-tenderized feet to head toward the sound.

  We came to the edge of a ridge that fell about a hundred feet to a broad plain, complete with a shimmering river. Just beyond were foothills and then a vast range of mountains. Mountains I recognized. We were close to the Turkish border. In the middle of this semi-verdant valley was a road. It would certainly head to the border crossing at Gurbulak-Bazargan. So much goodness in one vista!

  The part-scramble, part-fall down the slope to the valley floor would have looked comical to anyone who enjoys slapstick. I knew I was a highly-trained, astute, and physically coordinated soldier of fortune, yet I found myself running headlong like a kid down the steep hill, unable to stop the effects of excitement and gravity, and lost control several times, ending up in an unconscious forward roll. We both came to the valley floor running, clouds of red-colored dust pluming behind us. The river was near and calling to us like the Sirens to Odysseus.

  I resisted the urge to plunge into the cool waters—had to keep the ammo dry and all that. But my face did bury itself in the icy stream, and I splashed the water over my head, having to gasp deep breaths as it frigidly ran down my back. Then I drank my fill. I would deal with whatever maladies such as amoebic dysentery or radiation poisoning that may come later. For that moment I was concerned only with the satisfaction of thirst—which, as it turned out, wasn’t the best choice in a hostile, exposed landscape.

  Security should have been our first concern, but it wasn’t. We had mistakenly allowed our primal needs to get in the way of thinking about other people’s primal needs, namely that of killing the enemy. Again, that was us.

  They came out of the friggin’ woodwork—jeeps, small open-bed pickups, ridiculously small, rusted cars. We could have fought back, but we knew we didn’t have the ammo to do the job and had no cover or concealment. We weren’t going to make it back up on the ridge, either. So we did the next best thing. Merlin and I silently agreed to stay on our knees and raise our hands high into the air.

  The funny thing about surrender is that it never stops the beating. You would think that the universal sign of “uncle” and not attempting to resist would cause your opponent to simply take you into custody and cart you off to some nasty place of interrogation. But no! They just have to open that proverbial can of whoop-ass on you. Every fiber of my body wanted to fight back. Some of those bastards were just scrawny twenty-year-olds whom I could have easily bashed into the next life, but being surrounded by AKs and other various toys of destruction made me hold back. I needed to survive this. I wasn’t going through a plane crash and a trek across the desert just to be killed because my ego wouldn’t allow some kid to slap me around a bit.

  It ended up being slightly more than a bit. The packing syndrome came into play—that nasty little primal urge we have that makes us “follow the pack” into whatever mayhem they engage in. Humans somehow find anonymity in the crowd and gain power from the energy of the pack. The beating evolved from a couple smacks in the face to a kick in the stomach, then to a whack with the butt of a rifle, and then—well—it just got out of hand, and everyone joined in. Things went black fairly quickly.

  The smell of gasoline permeated the air. There was also the smell of food wafting from some distance, and the slightly acrid combination of the taste and smell of welding invaded my senses. It was nearly pitch dark, with just a sliver of light entering under a closed door to my right. I heard the beep, beep, beep of a forklift at work. Echoes of voices and containers and palettes told me the space beyond the door was likely a vast warehouse.

  I whispered Merlin’s name.

  He answered from across the room. “Don’t have to whisper, buddy—nobody’s listening.”

  “Any idea where the hell we are?” I asked him.

  “Seems like a warehouse to me,” he told me. “You have been out for about twenty minutes longer than me, and I have listened to what’s going on. Definitely some kind of distribution center. We may have been here for a day already if I correctly understood some of the Arabic I heard.”

  Shit, I was out that long? Well, this was interesting. Why would we have been taken captive in the first place instead of executed on the spot? Why keep us tied up in a warehouse somewhere unless we could be of value to them? Maybe our friends thought we had some tasty information. Maybe they thought they could get some ransom money for us. Maybe they were going to behead us on video a
nd have it sent to Al Jazeera. There had to be a reason. And, indeed, there was.

  The footsteps we then heard moving across a concrete floor toward our makeshift holding cell did nothing to betray their owners. What I had been expecting was that a couple more of our Iranian friends would come in, do a bit of yelling in some dialect I barely understood, expect answers, not get any, and then beat me back to sleep. What I had not been expecting was the tall silhouette of an obviously European man surrounded by shorter-armed locals, the warehouse lights blinding behind their dark figures.

  Like the flash of a mortar round going off, the lights in the room exploded into our eyes, causing temporary blindness. I squinted, allowing the white pain to enter my eyes in small increments until my pupils reacted. Finally, I was able to focus on the man standing in front of me. For a moment, my entire being jumped with the thought that we had been rescued. But my uncanny understanding of the nature of man betrayed those thoughts in a split second. There was no good reason for Erik to be standing in front of me surrounded by heavily armed Iranians!

  Oh—I know your mind is reeling, just like mine was at that moment. Did Erik come to the rescue? Awesome. But… what’s with the armed Iranians? And Erik not saying, “Let’s get outta here”? Wait—who is watching Melissa? Yeah, I know. So let me digress a bit here and fill in some of the blanks.

  I later learned that there had been other things happening concurrently with our “hard landing” of a Learjet, the fanatic co-pilot, our desert jaunt, capture, beating, unconscious period, and this beautiful moment.

  Jump back to my good ol’ hand-to-hand instructor, that red-haired, wiry, hard-assed bastard Erik Olsen. Well, after I had said my good-byes to Miss and gotten back into mission mode, Erik and my wife had headed off to Kirkpinar to watch the Turkish wrestling championships. What I did not know at the time was that Erik was in country for more reasons than to watch his favorite sport in one of its most historic settings. It seems it had merely been a kindness to bring my wife along, and simply a distraction to attend the games. What was about to come to light at our strange warehouse reunion was the nature of his real mission—yes, I said mission—in Turkey.

  Little had I known, or even suspected, that Erik was far from retired from his sordid quasi-military past. His remote location in that small New Hampshire town had in fact been a distant base of operations for a CIA NOC. He had continued participating in clandestine missions since he left the military as a non-official cover. I had sorta wondered where he was getting his income from. Anyhow, he had been called back to do a little work for his spook employers—work that was a lie wrapped in a deception.

  Okay—so where was I? Right—I was tied in this chair in a dank little room at the back of a warehouse somewhere near the Turkey/Iran border—I think. Standing in front of me was someone I had thought was a friend, in a situation that made me sure he was not—I think. The conversation went something like this—I think...

  “Well, this certainly is a cluster,” I said with a wry smile on my face.

  “You look like shit, Nick.”

  “Fuck you very much, Erik?”

  Erik paused for effect. “Truly sorry you are up to your neck in this shit, Nick.”

  “What shit is that?”

  “The usual shit. They have the oil. We have the power. We want the oil before it all runs out. We can’t make it look like we are stealing it or invading their country. It’s a very long-term strategy with an inevitable end. People get caught up in it. It’s the same old mess.”

  “How the hell is this about oil, Erik?”

  “It’s always about the oil. Everything is about the oil.”

  “So, it’s not about nuclear materials?” I asked him.

  He actually seemed a bit surprised. He smiled but didn’t answer as he circled around my chair, first looking me over, then Merlin.

  “The materials are just tools, buddy. You must understand, I am merely a pawn like you are. We are the Samurai. We serve. Our skills lie in the here and now. When there is something to be done, we do it. But we work for the great minds. Or at least they think they’re the great minds. They have a plan for the world. They see the future, they are very afraid of that future, and they make plans to control it. We just make part of those plans happen.”

  I was getting pissed. “What the hell are you talking about?

  “Nick!” Merlin called from the floor behind me, finally growing impatient at my lack of understanding. “We want Iran to smuggle nuclear materials.”

  Erik chuckled. “Your friend is astute. Yes, in fact we do want them to smuggle materials. I am here to help them. And you know what is really fucked up, Nick? I’m getting paid by both sides.”

  Merlin piped in, his voice betraying his disgust. “So we are paying you to help smuggle nuclear materials across the border into Iran, and the Iranians are paying you to help them smuggle nuclear materials into their country.”

  “Shit, Nick—he gets it. What is taking you so long?”

  Okay, I have to admit, it was taking me a minute to wrap my mind around the intricate spider web of deceit and international politics. I was a straight shooter. I had gotten caught in my own lies my entire life and eventually gave up the practice. This whole thing was a mess, but I was beginning to get it.

  “We want them to get caught, don’t we, Erik?”

  Erik gave me a big slap on the back. “Holy shit, son. I believe you get it now.”

  Oh, I got it, alright. This was just another piece of the overall endgame our government had been planning for years.

  Back during the Clinton era, the President’s National Security Strategy committee had set an overall strategy for control of the Middle East called “Dual Containment.” This basically meant that the military and government had worked out a way to control what they termed “the rogue states of Iraq and Iran.” USCENTCOM’s strategy was to get the U.S. engaged in the area to protect its interests in the region, which primarily came in the form of the uninterrupted flow of Gulf oil. The NSS had also publicly stated that “America will act against such emerging threats (such as Iraq and Iran) before they are fully formed. The greater the threat, the greater risk of inaction, and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves.” It went on to say, “The United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.” So, yeah, I got it. Iran was toast one way or another. It had been on the shit list for some time.

  “Yeah, I get it. So, if you are here, where is Miss?”

  “Like I said, Nick, this whole thing is a mess.”

  Not the answer I was looking for. I didn’t give a shit who Erik was or what deadly techniques he knew. Truthfully, I didn’t give a shit about the oil or any grand plan to control the Middle East. If he had hurt Miss, however, it was all over. He would be dead. I didn’t care if I had to tear his trachea out with my teeth.

  He expounded on his story of woe, for which I had no sympathy. I didn’t give a damn what had happened to him; I just needed my wife to be okay. He blathered on.

  “So I get this call from the Baghdad Station Chief. Did you know he used to be the Director of the CIA but chose to come to where the action is instead of sitting behind a desk?”

  I told him I had heard that guy’s ass had been kicked out of the job by a man who actually deserved to lead the organization, Mike Goldman.

  “Whatever,” he responded sarcastically. “Anyhow, he asked me to help him out with a couple issues he had, and although the duties seemed very distasteful, and against my better moral judgment, I said I would. One was to help a certain group of locals called the PKK—have you heard of them?”

  I knew all about them.

  “And,” he continued, “they, in turn were working with some Liberians who had obtained certain nuclear materials and were willing to sell them to the highest bidder, as long as that bidder was an enemy of the United States. At the beginning the whole plan sounded treasonous, until Richards told me the real reason behind it.”

/>   Erik pulled up a metal chair and sat in it backwards, facing me but just out of reach. He then snapped his fingers over his shoulder, and three of his henchmen came into the room. One had a chair. The other two hoisted Merlin to his feet and placed him in the chair.

  “You don’t need to fuck with him,” I told Erik. But he ignored me. His friends duct taped Merlin securely to the chair.

  “So, our Iranian friends were fully willing to pay for the materials. Apparently, they’re needed for the peaceful construction of a power plants to help provide cheap power to their countrymen. I knew it was a crock of shit. Our guys are paying me handsomely, and these guys are doing the same.” Erik paused and looked at the Iranians, then back at me. “They don’t understand a word I am saying to you. They think I am on their side.”

  Erik backhanded me across the face for effect.

  “So, with the uranium from Africa, and centrifuges from Pakistan, you know where this country is heading.”

  I did. They were well on their way to developing nuclear weapons. It really wasn’t a secret, after all. The world had known about it for more than ten years. So why was this important now? Because, as Merlin had understood, this wasn’t about the friggin’ nuclear weapons. This was about the oil, and about controlling this region of the globe. Tell the world you suspect Iran is breaking nuclear agreements and leak info about possible smuggling of nuclear materials. Warn the country in the press that if they didn’t stop, there may be hell to pay—meaning nuclear missiles flying into Europe or even the U.S. And then, the coup de gras: find the suspected nuclear materials being smuggled and invade, take control of the oil, then set up a puppet government and leave looking like the good guys. A lie wrapped in a deception.

  “But let me answer your question, my little grasshopper,” Erik started, “Your wife is probably fine.”