I cased the T-Top American Night Club & Hamburger Bar as we entered: twenty-four patrons, almost all men, all drinkers, none too suspicious. It was the only bar in Erbil for guys like us. It was a cheap American sports bar meets Western saloon, complete with warm beer, cigarette smoke, and armed patrons. Like Erbil itself, the place was filled with those too stupid or too poor to leave.
“To mercs and refugees,” Boon toasted and we downed our drinks.
I hated it here. If I was still in my old job, as a mission commander for Apollo Outcomes, I would be wearing a blue Harvie and Hudson suit and sipping my favorite bourbon, Woodford Reserve, in the Sky Bar of the Noble Hotel across town. I’d be sleeping on five-hundred-thread-count pillows and eating on an expense account. But I couldn’t go to a place like the Noble now. I couldn’t afford it, and I couldn’t afford to be seen. Not with Brad Winters looking for me. The only things I had left from my old life were my SCAR special forces combat assault rifle, my twin Beretta pistols, and two Nicaraguan cigars I was saving for a special occasion. Those and my wounds.
“Another Jack Daniel’s,” I said to the bartender. Jack wasn’t my favorite, but it was a reliable American friend in places like this.
“Another Bud,” Boon said, crushing his empty Budweiser can in his fist. There was something about the King of Beers. It always tasted better overseas.
Wildman grunted in disgust.
I couldn’t blame him. We had saved two hundred women, but we’d been forced to deliver them to the only place that would take them: the decrepit parking garage where more than a thousand Iraqi refugees were living without water or bathrooms. Better than sex slavery, but nothing even the worst-off American would tolerate.
Our reward, meanwhile, was two rolled rugs and a copper lantern. The uncle was a refugee himself; it was all he had. I’d tried to talk him out of the exchange, since the heirlooms weren’t worth twenty dollars, but he refused. We split the loot with our Kurdish partners, as per our agreement, so in the end all we got for risking our necks was a rug. That and the satisfaction of knowing we’d saved more than fifty women from a fate worse than death. That was worth something . . . wasn’t it?
“Wankers,” Wildman said.
I followed his gaze. In a corner sat a burly set of guys in action slacks and Glocks, laughing a bit too loud and slamming red Stoli shooters, a T-Top special.
War tourists.
For weeks now, these amateurs had been showing up in ones and twos, weapons in hand and ready to fight. I’d seen their kind before: vets who couldn’t adjust to life back home, adventure-seeking yahoos, life’s castaways. Some were good, but most were dangerous. The worst were the idealists. I met a guy in June from a Baptist church in middle America. He said he was going to make a Christian legion of mercenaries to fight ISIS with funding from Internet donations. Wildman had punched him in the face. The guy was probably bones in the desert by now.
“Hey boys,” a woman’s voice greeted us in a heavy Irish accent.
“Hi, Kylah,” I said, signaling the bartender for two Jameson whiskies. Kylah was in her midtwenties, had a slender frame, green eyes, long flame-red hair, and pale skin. Wildman joked she needed SPF-million to live in Iraq, but around here, she was the wild Irish Rose, a drink of cool water, everybody’s dream. Outside she donned a black chador, but tonight she wore her usual: tank top, cargo pants, and bloused combat boots, all black.
“Tiocfaidh ár lá,” we toasted, when the Jamesons arrived. Our day will come, the motto of the Irish Republican Army. Her father was a martyr, South Armagh Brigade.
“I heard you boys were back in town,” she said, turning to Boon with a smile.
“How did you hear that?” Boon asked. He was always worried about operational security, or “OpSec.”
“The old woman you saved on the bride bus,” Kylah replied, signaling for another shot. “The one with the 762 bullet in her arm and bits of bus in her arse. The one you left on my doorstep, remember? I patched her up pretty and put her on a morphine drip. Then she told me everything.” Kylah ran a medical clinic. She patched us up, along with most of the strays that showed up at her door.
“Speaking of which . . .” She slipped off her barstool to take a closer look at the jihadi bite on my face. I batted her mothering away.
“That’s going to leave a scar,” she said.
“Just add it to the others.”
“Ugly dog,” Boon said. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me or the man who bit me.
“What happened to the bridge at Kalak?” I asked. “No way the Peshmerga could blow that bridge.” The Peshmerga was Kurdistan’s militia, and the last line of defense against ISIS.
“The U.S. finally entered the war,” she said. “Two American fighter jets bombed the bridge last week.”
I laughed. “Really? Why now?”
She shrugged. “ISIS took over the city of Sinjar near the Syrian border and did one of their ‘forced conversion’ campaigns with the Yazidis there. They slaughtered five thousand. The rest fled to Mount Sinjar, where they’re stuck now, either starving to death or facing the scimitar. The U.S. declared it a genocide, and they’ve been bombing ISIS ever since.”
Five thousand killed and the U.S. declares it genocide? Put a few zeroes after that number and it’s just another day in Africa. Hell, 250,000 were massacred in the Congo; 500,000 in Darfur; and more than 800,000 in Rwanda, and the Pentagon still couldn’t find those places on a map.
“Let me see what I can do about this music,” Kylah said, as vintage Metallica screeched from the jukebox. War tourists loved Metallica. Her hips and hair mesmerized as she moved.
I felt a presence behind me, swiveled, and pulled my Beretta pistol.
“I could have blasted your face off,” I said.
“Good to see you, too, Captain.”
“Goddamn Bear,” I said with a laugh, as we clasped forearms. “Once a dumb-ass, always a dumb-ass.”
He shrugged and sat next to me. “Some things don’t change.”
Bear had been one of my Airborne grunts during our Balkans tour in the ’90s. He was huge, and he looked like he could still bench four hundred pounds, but otherwise things definitely had changed. He used to be a nice young man; now he had a shaved head, bushy brown beard, and tattoo sleeves, featuring skulls and sickles. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name his mother had given him, but that didn’t matter. Most of us in this life lost our names, one way or the other.
“Buy you a drink?” he offered.
“Hell no,” I said, signaling the bartender for another round. “I’m buying. It’s on credit, and I have no intention of paying my tab.”
Two Jack Daniel’s slid down the bar and we tapped shot glasses and drank, my fifth straight whiskey in fifteen minutes. I’d been working up a tolerance for Irish and Tennessee firewater along with my bar tab.
“What are you doing here?” Bear asked.
Laying low. Staying off the grid. Trying not to get assassinated by Apollo Outcomes and my ex-boss, Brad Winters, who didn’t like loose ends.
“Odd jobs,” I said, hoping Bear would take the hint and change the subject. He didn’t, so I kept talking. “In the underground railroad business, out of Mosul.”
“For Apollo?”
No, not for Apollo. But I didn’t need to tell Bear that. In fact, it was a good sign he didn’t know. It meant Winters probably hadn’t put a contract out on me.
“Working for myself,” I said, nodding at Wildman and Boon. “Three-man team.”
“Figured,” Bear said. “Not enough money out here for the big boys.”
“What about you?”
Bear downed a second Jack. The T-Top always kept them coming. “I’ve got my own company now,” he said.
That surprised me. The kid had his own team? But then again, he also had gray hair in his beard, now that I looked. Jesus. Bear wasn’t a kid anymore. How long had it been since Bosnia? Twenty years?
“Small operation. Sixteen-man team and some local talent. We’re down near Baiji, working the oil fields. Infrastructure protection. We’re a subcontractor to a subcontractor for an unnamed oil company.”
“Gulf Keystone?”
“Can’t say.”
Probably Chevron or Talisman, I thought.
Baiji was the biggest oil refinery in north Iraq, at the edge of the Makhmour oil field and just beyond the Kurdish boundary. It was also the frontline between ISIS, Shia militia, the Iraqi army, and Iranian Quds special forces, not to mention the criminal gangs and tribal strongmen bunkering oil for profit. They came in from the Jazira, the lawless desert in the middle of Iraq. Bear must have been busy.
“So what brings you to the T-Top?”
“Personal security detail,” Bear said, nodding toward two older men who were half in the bag and flirting shamelessly with Kylah. “Erbil is the last free airport in northern Iraq. The oil men have no intention of being cut off.”
One of the executives got up to dance and “accidentally” grabbed Kylah’s ass.
“They seem to be enjoying your girlfriend’s company,” Bear said.
Boon laughed.
“Just a friend,” I said, hoping to hell Kylah was staying away from mercs like me. I didn’t begrudge a young woman her fun, but I knew that by the time she was my age, Dr. Kylah Murphy would be back in Europe with two redheaded kids, a terrier, and a minivan. “But for their own safety, you might think about getting those assholes on their airplane.”
Bear laughed. “I hear you,” he said. He downed his third Jack, then stared at the empty tumbler.
“You should join us,” he said. “In Baiji, I mean. As a partner. The bunkhouse is no-frills—we’re laid up at the U.S. Army’s old Camp Speicher—but the pay is top-notch, Tom, and always on time. And you can operate as you please, I promise you that.”
I couldn’t help but feel annoyed. This was the second time I’d been propositioned in one night. And this was no casual offer. Bear wanted me. He was probably desperate for good men. But I could hear it in his voice; it was more than that.
It hit me then, what I must look like. Scruffy, boozing, and desperate in a shithole like the T-Top. Bear thought I was a squaddie, washed up here like the other losers, and he . . . goddammit, he pitied me. A soldier I once commanded pitied me.
But Bear didn’t know me. I’d spent ten years working for a multi-billion-dollar mercenary corporation that did things the CIA wished it could do, with the firepower of a SEAL team: manipulating foreign presidential elections, staging “color revolutions” to overthrow governments, undermining terrorist plots, assassinating anyone, and “shaping the environment”—basically making shit happen for the client, no questions asked. I did questionable things, and I was the best.
Until three months ago in Ukraine.
“I don’t do that kind of work anymore,” I said.
“What kind?”
Warfare, twenty-first-century style. “We’re okay with our current employment situation,” I said.
I heard Wildman grunt disapproval and walk off. I didn’t even look at Boon.
Bear wrote his sat phone number on a beer coaster and slid it to me. “If you change your mind.”
“I won’t. But thanks.” I took it anyway and we did a bro hug: only our chests made contact and we loudly slapped each other on the back. “It was good seeing you, Bear.”
I watched him walk out the door with the executives at his heel.
“Am I doing the right thing?” I said, to myself as much as to Boon.
“The thing I like about this job,” Boon said, beer in hand, “is that I don’t have to answer those questions.”
“What about Wildman?”
Boon took a long drink. “He’ll be back.”
“You don’t need to stay with me,” I said.
“No, I don’t. But I will.”
“Why?”
“I believe in you.”
We clinked drinks, but Boon didn’t catch my eye. He was still watching Kylah dance.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
Boon nodded. He knew I didn’t mean the bar. Bear would put the word out, in casual conversation over beers, and pretty soon others would find me, too. Including Brad Winters or someone who wanted to curry favor with him. Winters was a powerful man and Apollo Outcomes had incredible reach. It wasn’t safe here anymore. It never really was.
“Where to?”
I shrugged. “Anywhere, once this last job is done.”