SIXTEEN
The morning temperature in Dubai hit 108 degrees and the humidity hovered near ninety percent. The eight Americans who filed down the jet stairs looked weathered and worn; black soot was visible on the cheeks of virtually all of them, in sharp contrast to the rings around their eyes where they’d been wearing goggles during the hit on the house in Caracas nineteen hours earlier. Their hair was a mess, both from the helmets or ball caps they wore during the mission and from the bedhead picked up from lying awkwardly on cabin chairs or on the cabin floor, men packed nuts to butts in a luxury aircraft poorly suited for troop transport.
The leader of the team, call sign Hades, was last off the bird, and when he came down the stairs, he filed in with the others near the hatch of the cargo hold, ready to grab his heavy ruck of gear and his rifle. He was as tired as the rest of the team, if not more so, and he also had the additional burden of knowing he’d lost one of his men.
Hades rubbed his eyes, avoiding the sun and the glare off the aircraft as best he could, then reached up as his MultiCam rucksack was handed down.
Just like with the rest of the team, all of Hades’s tactical gear and clothing were in his massive Osprey pack. Now he wore dingy linen pants, flip-flops, and a red loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt. The seven other men all wore civilian clothing, as well, but their beards, mustaches, fit physiques, and ages gave them away as some sort of a fighting force.
But there was no one here to see them. They’d parked in an out-of-the-way portion of the tarmac, and other than the pilot and copilot, there wasn’t a soul in sight.
Until a black Mercedes passenger van rolled into view, coming from the direction of an airport entrance reserved for government personnel. The Mercedes parked in front of a nearby hangar, and a Middle Eastern man in a gray suit and tie climbed out from behind the wheel and opened the rear door.
“Somebody call an Uber?” Mercury quipped, but no one laughed. They were beat from the thirty-five-hour round-trip flight and the fight in Caracas, and their spirits had taken a hit with the death of Ronnie Blight. Joking and ribbing one another was a thing with this team of mercs, but today Mercury’s tired attempt fell flat.
Hades moved with his men, squinting in the sun because his Oakley shades were still tucked deep in a pouch in his pack. He headed for the black Mercedes van that would take them all, he assumed, to the apartment building where they resided two to a room here in Dubai. But just before he folded himself into the van behind the others, a silver BMW 8 Series Gran Coupe pulled up, and the driver of this vehicle climbed out and opened a rear door.
Hades handed his pack off to Thor and headed to the BMW. “Catch you guys in a bit. Clean and secure your gear before you rack out.” He knew where he was going; he’d been through this before. He’d be meeting with his employer, and he was damn glad. He had a few things he needed to get off his chest about the shit show they’d just experienced.
As he rode in the back of the sleek four-door coupe, it wasn’t lost on him that he hadn’t bathed in two and a half days. The rich leather looked brand-new; the wood paneling around him seemed to have been buffed to a brilliant shine that very morning.
And Hades looked down at his hands, dirt in the cracks like spiderwebs, even though he’d worn gloves, and he saw a faint smear of Ronnie’s blood on his forearm, even though he’d worn a long-sleeved tunic.
Hades’s real name was Keith Hulett, but no one on his team called him that. He hailed from Fort Wayne, Indiana, the son of a soybean farmer.
Hulett had been a master sergeant in the U.S. Army before joining his current company several years before, working his way through security contracts in the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. He’d moved up the ranks in his company to team leader, and then he, along with his eight men, all specially selected by him, had served as guns for hire for the United Arab Emirates for the last year and a half.
But Hades had only seven men now.
Hulett rode in the backseat in silence for nearly thirty minutes before the BMW turned onto al Saada Street. This was downtown Dubai; luxury cars whizzed by as he and his luxury car turned into the Roda al Morooj, a five-star hotel.
Hades knew he wouldn’t be overnighting here; it was just a convenient place for his employer to meet with him. He’d been here before, and he’d found the place stuffy and pretentious, but Hulett knew he was just a grunt working for a paycheck, so he figured the guy who signed the paycheck could meet him wherever he damn well pleased.
He was escorted directly past security in the lobby by a pair of well-dressed guards, caught a few looks from tourists who regarded his Hawaiian shirt, beard, bedhead, and flip-flops with more amusement than disdain, and soon he was in an express elevator, followed in by two additional security men. They traveled to the eighth floor, then walked together down a carpeted hallway to a set of hand-carved and gold-embossed double doors.
Hades had forgone the security protocols at the entrance to the hotel, but here at the front door of the suite he lifted his arms, and a new pair of men in suits frisked him from his ankles to the top of his head. One of the men pulled a penlight out of the breast pocket of his coat and shined it in Hulett’s face. “Open,” the man said, and Hulett opened his mouth.
The security man searched his mouth and throat for weapons; what kind, specifically, Hulett had no idea, but upon finding nothing but a few fillings, the Middle Eastern man allowed the American to pass.
Keith Hulett recognized the suite from his last visit to meet with his contact in the Signals Intelligence Agency.
He knew the man only as Tarik, which was a first name, and probably made-up. “Tarik” meant “conqueror” in Arabic, and Hulett only knew this because when he fought in Iraq, a corrupt police chief in some backwater shit hole outside Karbala had told him this, shortly before the man’s corruption led to his death by the hands of a local businessman he’d been shaking down.
Hulett was by no means fluent in Arabic, but he’d picked up his fair share in his four deployments in Iraq, his three in Afghanistan, and then fighting for a paycheck in Yemen for Tarik.
Yemen had been fulfilling work for Hades and his team. They got the job done, no matter the mission, and of this they were proud. Their tactics and procedures would have put them in Fort Leavenworth if they were still in the U.S. military, so to Hulett’s way of thinking, he had the best of both worlds. Flexible rules of engagement kept him and his men safer and the enemy deader, in a mission fully supported by the U.S. government.
A coalition of nine nations fought in Yemen, mostly through proxies and mercenaries, against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. But while the United States was part of the coalition, and while they helped and supported the Emirates, the men in Hades’s small team were not working for the USA.
The Middle Eastern monarchy hired these Americans to eliminate its enemies, but the CIA knew about it and didn’t push back, and this gave Hulett more than enough justification to cash his check every month.
It was militarized contract killing, and Keith Hulett had been doing it for a year and a half under the cloak of authority of the UAE, an American ally and partner.
And although he did his job for money, he was technically not a mercenary, because the Emirates had given him an officer’s rank. He found this mildly amusing; he’d never been an O. He’d spent thirteen years in U.S. special forces, worked his way up to master sergeant, but had been given the dreaded OTH, or other than honorable discharge, after members of his A-team accused him of killing an unarmed man in the Sangin Valley and then planting a walkie-talkie on the body to make him appear to be an enemy conspirator.
He was tossed from the military for that, but it didn’t hurt him much in his subsequent private work. Hulett made over three hundred grand a year now, and he’d told himself there was nothing he wouldn’t do if he was paid to do it.
All the men under him in his merc unit had had their own run-ins with the military judicial system and then fallen on hard times, each for a different offense, ranging from bad conduct discharges to dishonorable discharges.
These men entered the mercenary world already dirty, and that only helped them justify their actions. Still, the dirt had grown on them insidiously in the past eighteen months of increasingly violent, and morally questionable, operations, to the point where Hulett wondered sometimes if he was the only man on his team who wondered if he was going to hell for his actions.
He was certain he would never know, because he would never ask the guys if they had any reservations.
The other men made an average of one hundred twenty grand a year, a fact Hulett was thinking about at present because of Ronnie Blight. Ares’s family would have to find another source of income, because the company they all worked for didn’t pay death benefits.
The American steeled himself to speak with Tarik about what had gone down in Venezuela, and was certain that the death of his contractor was the reason he’d been brought to downtown Dubai straight off the aircraft.
Tarik entered in a crisp white button-down shirt, open at the collar, and a pair of designer blue jeans. He was probably about forty-five, Hulett thought, with silver sparkling in his short black hair and thin beard.
The men shook hands; neither of them was smiling.
Hulett said, “I apologize, sir.”
“For what?” Tarik’s English was impeccable.
“I should have probably cleaned up a little first. Just got off the transport.”
The Emirati gave a slight look of offense. “You don’t think I’ve been to war? You don’t think I’ve lived in shit? I spent five years in and out of Yemen, started as a soldier, ended as a policy maker.”
Hulett was sure Tarik had not been a soldier, and he was not a policy maker now. He was a spy.
He said, “I’ve spent my time in the ditches and in the streets. I don’t care how I, or how my soldiers, look or smell. I only care about results.”
The American said, “Well, sir, if you aren’t offended by my odor and my dress, then I guess I won’t bring it up again.”
Tarik nodded, and the matter was settled. “You are probably wondering why I brought you here.”
The two men sat down on comfortable chairs near the window.
“I assume it has to do with everything that happened in Venezuela.”
Tarik shook his head. “No. I’m satisfied with that operation.”
Hulett cocked his head now. “You’re satisfied? One of my boys got killed.”
The Middle Easterner seemed to think about this a moment before asking, “Have you ever lost a man before?”
“I’ve never been an officer before, so while men on my A-team died when I was in SF, I wasn’t the OIC.”
Tarik sat ramrod straight in his chair, his dark eyes boring holes into Hulett. “Yes. Well, I have been an officer in charge, and I have lost many men. As long as the mission is honorable, then there is nothing to worry about. You might not believe in the same God as I do, but I know that your man was martyred and valorous. What more can a soldier ever hope for?”
Hulett figured Ronnie Blight had probably hoped for something more than martyrdom via a bullet through his windpipe and a lonely unmarked grave in a foreign country for his charred corpse.
But he didn’t argue the point. Instead, he said, “I get the fight we’re waging in Yemen. But I don’t get what the hell we were doing in South America. That dude we wasted was a middle-aged American. We’re supposed to be over here fighting rebels working with Iran’s Quds Force. You can’t tell me he was working for Quds.”
“He was not Iranian. But he was working in the furtherance of the aims of our common enemy.”
“He was working for the Iranians?”
“Originally, in fact, he was working for me.”
Hulett sat back in his chair. “What?”
“He was supporting my efforts in Europe. He ran with valuable information about our operation, then I found him, and I sent you.”
“With orders to kill him?”
“Yes. He had intelligence that could have seriously degraded our abilities in Yemen. We don’t think he told the Venezuelans, but if some other nation got to him, it could have made trouble for us.”
“I’m not so sure someone else didn’t get to him.”
“Meaning?” Tarik asked with a raised eyebrow.
“We never saw anybody on site but the target, and four Venezuelan intel pukes. But I had one dead and two others hit, a third of my damn force. The Venezuelans had been drugged, that was for sure. They didn’t do it, it was someone else.” He paused. “And it wasn’t Drummond. No way.”
“Another gunman was present? What do you know about him?”
“They said he was good. Confident. They couldn’t get a good look at him. Spoke English, but every dumbass on Earth speaks English these days.”
Hulett noticed Tarik’s normally confident mood falter a little; he looked out the window of the high-rise, silent for several seconds.
The American understood. “You know who it was, don’t you?”
Tarik looked back to his mercenary again. “The data you transferred to me in the aircraft. I had my people look through it. It was a computer application and a database that Drummond took from us. A tool that helps us find the enemy before they find us.”
Hulett sat up straighter. Tarik was about to tell him who killed Ronnie Blight.
“We decrypted the information, thinking Drummond might have used this program in Venezuela in an attempt to keep people away from him. He was an outlaw in America, after all; it stood to reason America would come after him.”
“I’m listening,” said Hulett.
“Our cyber staff linked into the entire network of cameras in northern Venezuela, in the hopes we could find out who Drummond met with, if someone from the USA had made contact with him. We didn’t find any evidence that someone spoke with him before you killed him, but this morning an image was picked up many kilometers from Drummond’s house.”
Tarik nodded, then said, “The man recognized by the software is a former American CIA officer, but a man who has been disavowed by the Americans. He’s a rogue, a freelance assassin. One of the best, if not the best, in the business.
“We don’t know for certain if he was involved in what happened to Drummond, but they call him the Gray Man.”
Hulett sat up straighter. “Most folks I run with say there are about a dozen jokers out there calling themselves the Gray Man.”
“Then most folks you know are wrong. There is one man. And I have his name.”
Hulett’s nostrils flared like a bull. “Who is this fucker?”
“Courtland Gentry. Several years ago the Americans came to me for help in finding him. I was unable to provide much assistance; the man never showed up on my radar. But I do have images of him, and it is clearly the same person.”
Tarik thought for a while, then said, “We will have to keep an eye out for this man, and others like him. Our entire operation was almost compromised by Mr. Drummond, and I can’t have that happen again.”
Hulett shook his head. “This is getting a little too Jason Bourne for me. Look, Tarik, I’m a shooter. My guys are shooters. You give us a target, a clean target, and then we go and hit it. That’s how this shit works.”
Tarik countered. “That’s how it is supposed to work. But you killed thirty people the other night in Aden. Most of them Sunni. Not very clean, was it?”
Hades made a face, surprised at the apparent admonishment. He didn’t hide his anger now. “Sometimes we hit it clean. Sometimes, like in Aden the other night, some collateral catches it, but that’s just war. It’s precision counterterrorism, what we do for you. Bitch about me all you want, but this is a shit-ton cleaner than carpet-bombing cities, which is what you jokers would be doing if it weren’t for us.”
Tarik reached out and put a hand on Hulett’s knee to calm him. “That is fair, Hades. Honestly, I don’t care about the lives of some shopkeepers. We are fighting a cancer, and in so doing, some benign tissue is necessarily damaged.
“You and your small team are valuable additions to our fight in Yemen, but even so, the Emirates are struggling in that cesspool. Iran and its proxies are pushing not only there but in North Africa, in Syria. Their expansion around the world is shocking, and it is growing, and the UAE does not have the means to stop it. Our sometime partners in Saudi Arabia are helpless, as well.”
Hulett said, “Well, maybe if you didn’t have us off running errands in South America, we could help the cause.”
Tarik shook his head. “Our footprint in Yemen has been shrinking. The Shias are dominating. We are pulling forces out immediately.” He paused. With a pained expression he said, “That battle has been lost.”
Hulett didn’t know why he was getting this lesson, but he had a guess. “Are you firing us?”
Tarik shook his head. “Repositioning you.”
This was a surprise. “Repositioning us? Where?”
“The battle for Yemen might be lost, but there is a way to win the war against Shia expansion. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
The American shrugged. Shias, Sunnis, he didn’t give a shit about any of that talk. He concerned himself with whomever the opposition in front of him was. He wasn’t here to win any wider war. Still, he was here to get paid, and it sounded like the spigot of cash from Yemen was about to be shut off unless he was ready to pivot to whatever Tarik wanted him to do. “Where are you sending us?”
“I want you to go to Europe.”
“I don’t catch a lot of news, but I’m pretty sure Iran isn’t using local rebel forces in Belgium to expand their territory like they’re doing in Yemen. What the hell is over there for us?”
“We are running an operation against Quds Force terrorist cells active across the continent.”
“Quds Force is planning attacks in Europe? Why don’t you just communicate with the CIA about all that?”
“We are working in conjunction with the Agency, just as always. Our efforts in Europe are supported by them, just like our work here in the Middle East would have been impossible without our American partners.”
This placated Keith Hulett, so he didn’t question his mission anymore. “What do you need us to do?”
“I need you to go to a nice home in Berlin, a safe house we will acquire for you. My associates there will be looking at camera feeds, and if Court Gentry shows up through facial recognition in Germany, I will give you a target.”
Hulett was skeptical. “So, we just sit and wait, hope you get lucky?”
Tarik shook his head. “I have other work for you. I need men eliminated. Easy targets, certainly not of Gentry’s caliber. It should be quite simple for you. The targets will be Iranian nationals. Terrorists.”
Hulett sat back in surprise. “You want us orchestrating kills on European soil? That’s a damn sight different than waxing some fuckers in the middle of a war zone.”
“Is it? Is it, really, if the . . . how did you put it? If the fuckers are cut from the same cloth, come from the same enemy, and your nation approves of the mission?
“You and your eight . . . apologies, seven men, will be paid two and a half times your current wage.” Tarik smiled. “It will be easy work for you. You don’t stand out in Europe the way I would, the way my case officers would.”
Hulett wasn’t buying this. “I’ve been to Europe. There are a lot of Arabs there.”
“Who receive extra scrutiny from the authorities. I had operatives working there, doing the same work I am asking of you. They were good, but they were running greater and greater risk of compromise every day, due to the color of their skin, whereas you and your men will have unlimited freedom of movement.”
This made sense to Hulett, more so because he wasn’t one to challenge a new job opportunity falling into his lap just as another job was lost.
“When would we leave?”
“Take a day to rest. I’ve run you all hard. Grieve for your fallen comrade. Then I’ll have you transported to Germany. We are already watching out for Gentry in case he shows up where he can cause us strife.”
Keith Hulett liked the thought of getting out of Dubai and heading into the heart of Europe. He liked the thought of leaving the war behind for a while and working as a hit man for an intelligence service that had the full backing and confidence of the CIA. And he liked the idea of killing the son of a bitch who killed Ronnie.
This seemed like solid work for a man of his skill set.
In the back of his mind, though, he had suspicions and reservations about what this sneaky intelligence chief sitting in front of him would have him do down the road. But Hulett would go and be a good soldier, because even after everything he had done, that was the story that he told himself about himself.