Burned Bridges Read online

  Burned Bridges

  AJ Stewart

  Jacaranda Drive

  For my grandfather, John Stewart, and all the brave men and women who served in World War II.

  And for Heather

  Contents

  Readers’ Crew

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Readers’ Crew

  If You Enjoyed This Book

  Also by AJ Stewart

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Readers’ Crew

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  Chapter One

  Approximately 100 kms Outside Baghdad, Iraq, 2011

  Neither of the two men expected to die that day. Not that it wasn’t a place for dying. The hard, hot landscape had seen more than its share of war and more than its share of death. And while both men were aware of the possibility, each carried assumptions about the other that assured them that today was not the day they would end. Both men had been wrong before.

  The clay structure worked like a convection oven. The rear of the building had been consumed by the sand, or perhaps built into the slight undulation in the ground on purpose. There were only three openings—two glassless windows and an entrance with no door, but the entrance faced the afternoon sun, and the desert wind pushed the hot air into the building and circulated it, roasting anything inside the dark space. The poor design was probably part of the reason the building had been abandoned, and part of the reason the man in the standard-issue army combat uniform had selected it as his home base.

  The man had served long enough to become a staff sergeant, but he wasn’t used to the full ACU, and the sweat had soaked through the so-called moisture-wicking T-shirt he wore underneath. The T-shirt alone was his preferred dress, especially in the air-conditioned confines of the quartermaster’s office, where he spent as much of his time as possible. But out in the middle of this hellhole, with insurgents still taking potshots at military vehicles, he couldn’t be too careful.

  He stood feet splayed, struggling to recall his training, his Beretta M9 aimed at the rectangle of bright light bursting through the doorway. His technique was poor and his thumb hurt when he tried to disengage the safety with his dominant hand, so he flicked the switch with his left and then held the weapon in a two-handed fashion. Then he waited. He gripped the gun tight and it quickly grew heavy. But he wasn’t planning on being there all day.

  The second man walked casually toward the door. He kept his cadence slow but steady. His hands by his side but away from his sidearm. He had no wish to alarm the staff sergeant inside with unnecessary movement. The man’s heart rate was slightly raised, but his hands were dry. He had spent a decade in the heat, somewhere or other on the planet, and his body had become as used to it as it ever would. He wore a sand-colored coat and trousers, no camouflage pattern, and a US Army surplus advanced combat helmet.

  He stopped on the road, a rough track barely discernible in the satellite images from the rest of the baked earth around it, and looked at the building ahead and the makeshift structure beside it. In another place and in better condition the side structure might have been called a carport—corrugated iron sheets covered in canvas and dirt to hide it from the prying eyes in the sky. The iron roof sloped from the edge of the clay building down into the ground. It was a hasty but effective ruse that not only prevented the building from casting shadows that could be picked up by satellites, but also served to hide the Navistar 5000-MV tractor-trailer and the sand-colored twenty-foot intermodal shipping container the truck carried.

  The man stepped from the white light of day to the dark hole of the doorway. He lifted his hands further from his hips, an unnatural way to walk, but disarming for the man he knew to be watching him. He stepped into the darkness and then stopped. He was, as his father would have called it, a sitting duck. He was not a huge man—not in his army—but his frame filled the small doorway. He was blinded, his vision nothing but random smudges like paints on a palette. He felt softness underfoot, as if someone had laid a carpet of dried palm fronds on the bare earth, and he smelled the acrid tones of diesel fuel. There was nothing to do but wait. His eyes would adjust, in time. If there was time.

  The staff sergeant licked the sweat from his upper lip. The skin was rough and in need of shaving. He looked forward to it, the ritual of cleanliness. Such things separated him from the barbarians that inhabited this dusty platter of earth. He rolled one shoulder, feeling the tension from holding the gun. Then he watched the silhouette in the doorway, not moving, hands away from his body. Like a gunslinger from the movies, the man had watched as a child. Feeling his arm fatigue, the staff sergeant finally spoke.

  “You have no business being here,” he said.

  “Nor you,” said the second man. His accent sounded vaguely American, but the staff sergeant knew that the man was not wearing a Stars and Stripes patch on his shoulder.

  “This is not your war,” said the staff sergeant. “Your people chickened out, remember?”

  “As far I know, it’s no one’s war. You won, didn’t you? That’s what I heard on TV. You won, and you’re pulling out.”

  The sergeant licked his lip again and snarled. There was a mocking tone in the man’s voice. “You’re a traitor,” he spat.

  The man in the doorway took two paces. “You need to come with me.”

  “I said, you’re a traitor.”

  “You’ll need to do a lot better than that, Sergeant.”

  “You’re a disgrace to your country.” He felt the sweat seeping from every pore and longed for the air-conditioned comfort of the truck’s cabin. “You turned your back on your people and fought for the enemy.”

  “I hunt the enemy. Now I hunt you.”

  “I am a soldier in the United States Army. You don’t have the—”

  “You’re a shopkeeper. You work in supply, you run the canteen. And you deal drugs. And now you’re supplying arms to insurgents. Guns that get fired against your own men. So don’t talk to me about being a traitor.”

  “You don’t have the authority.”

  The man in the sand-colored clothes swiftly drew his gun from his holster and aimed at the staff sergeant. “I have all the authority I need. Now drop your weapon, and let’s take a little drive to Camp Victory.”

  The staff sergeant blinked hard. His eyes were well adjusted to the darkness, but the sweat burned them. The traitor had his gun out now, but he wasn’t going to use it. He wasn’t a real soldier, but he was wrapped up in the NATO web somehow, and that meant he had rules and procedures to follow. Rules that certainly prevented him shooting a US soldier. There would be hell to pay if he did. An international incident, like the Gulf War all over again. But the staff sergeant knew the traitor would be true to his wo
rd to deliver him to the MPs at Camp Victory in Baghdad, so he ran the numbers. Running the numbers was something he was very good at. Playing the percentages. Looking at the angles. Risk versus reward. The staff sergeant knew this guy was connected. How and to whom he didn’t know. But enough to make it risky. And he was a boy scout. Rights and wrongs, blacks and whites. The staff sergeant came to a conclusion and made his last play.

  The staff sergeant said, “I’m going to need the money back.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Deadly. My people will want the money back.”

  “You try to set me up with a bribe, and when it doesn’t work, you want it back?”

  “They’ll want it back.”

  “Well, they aren’t getting it. The money will go into evidence, and you will go into the stockade. And if you’re helpful, the army won’t send you to Guantanamo, they’ll just send you to Leavenworth. And whoever they are can go to hell.”

  The staff sergeant watched the frame in the doorway. The man didn’t move. He was fit and used to the heat in a way the staff sergeant never wanted to be. But he was wrong. Wrong about the staff sergeant, wrong about the people directing him. Wrong about himself. He wore no uniform, no tags or badges, no rank. He looked like the thousands of other private security contractors marching around Iraq, getting fat and rich off the oil money. But he wasn’t one of them. He was neither security nor private, neither official nor unofficial. Easily commanded and conveniently forgotten.

  “My people won’t go to hell,” the staff sergeant said. “They own hell.”

  Then he fired.

  The staff sergeant wasn’t a combat soldier. He was a wheeler-dealer in a combat zone. A very lucrative place to be for a man with his skill set. Finding things that his fellow soldiers wanted in an environment where such things were not so easily sourced. But the whole thing was predicated on understanding the risks. And driving all the way from Baghdad to Basra and back was a big risk. But the reward was big, too. As long as he kept his head down. Which he did. He was very good at keeping away from places where bullets were flying or bombs were exploding. Out of the sun and out of the heat and away from the fight.

  Which meant he didn’t spend as much time at the range as regulated. Truth was, he hadn’t fired a gun since arriving in Iraq, and he had no plans to. Until now. But this guy was more trouble than he was worth. He was too close, and the pullout of troops too imminent. So he fired. But the first trigger pull on an M9 is long, and for the untrained user, the longer pull could affect accuracy. The staff sergeant pulled and the Beretta fired, but even at close range, the shot flew high and wide, just above and to the right of the traitor’s shoulder.

  Unlike the staff sergeant, the other man was trained, and trained hard. He seemed not to move a muscle, not in reaction to being fired upon, not as he pulled the trigger of his own weapon. The staff sergeant pulled the M9 down and across and fired again, and as he did he heard the explosion of the other man’s weapon and the burst of flame that reached for him across the dark space like an angry dragon.

  The impact knocked the staff sergeant backward. He hit the ground hard and his head spun for a moment. Instinctively he felt for the site of the pain and felt the thick blood oozing through his fingers. The pain was immense, and the staff sergeant was not built for pain. He dragged himself up onto one arm and looked toward the doorway. The bright light shone through, white and unrelenting. The silhouette was gone. He tried sitting, but vertigo swept through him. He felt the compulsion to vomit but nothing came.

  On one side of his body, alarms were going off. It felt like half of him was shutting down. The muscles in his left leg were spasming as if he were receiving electric shocks. The sweat was pooling in his left eye, making it sting and close reflexively. He took a moment to breathe. He expected the pain to abate, but it did not. Was this what being shot felt like? Was this what death felt like?

  The staff sergeant felt an immense desire to lie down and sleep. He was aware enough to know that it was a trick, that sleep with this much pain was surely impossible, and lying down meant giving up. And he wasn’t giving up. He gingerly levered himself onto his right side, the functioning side, then straightened his arm to create a prop, under which he was able to place his foot. He moved his hand to his knee and used the lever motion again to raise himself to an unstable standing position. He was bent over, bolts of agony shooting across his chest and down the left side of his body. He realized that he had dropped his sidearm, but he didn’t waste time looking for it. He knew guys in the ordnance corps who could replace a lost M9 for a little something of what the staff sergeant could supply.

  He checked himself to confirm that his left arm was still attached, and found that despite the pain, it was. He looked in one piece, more or less. He stood upright in stages, each movement punctuated by pain and nausea. Once standing, he glanced again at the doorway. And then he saw the other man. The traitor. He was lying on the straw-covered earth. The lower half of his body was lit by the sun pulsing in through the doorway. His torso and head were in the shaded corner of the building. He wasn’t moving, nor moaning. He wasn’t doing anything.

  The staff sergeant recalled getting two shots away. The first had missed, exploding into the wall in a burst of dried clay. The second was better, aimed somewhere near the target, before he was punched backward by the force of being shot himself. It seemed his second shot had hit. The traitor looked dead. But the staff sergeant wanted to make sure. Not by testing the guy’s pulse. By finishing the job.

  He couldn’t be sure if the traitor had been alone. He had never been before. When he wasn’t with his posse of misfits, he had been with the woman. But if she was with him, why hadn’t she responded to the sound of gunshots? Had he told her to stay in the vehicle? She wasn’t the type to listen to an order like that. So his best guess was that she wasn’t around. The traitor was alone.

  The staff sergeant shuffled into the back corner of the building, to the wall without an opening. There he found the drums. He had built his own stockpile of diesel and gasoline, and as usual, his foresight pleased him. The semitrailer had more than enough diesel to get back to Baghdad, so he could afford to lose what he left behind. He felt around in the dark for the lever ring he had left there. Finding it with his good hand, he wrapped the ring around the cap on the drum, tightened it, then pulled the lever. The pressure of the fuel inside gave a pop and the cap came away easily. The sweet tang of gasoline bit at his nostrils as fumes lifted up from the drum. But that was not the smell he wanted. He selected the next drum in line and repeated the process. This time he sniffed with less vigor and found the diesel fuel he was searching for. He found the hand pump in the corner of the building, which he grabbed up like a spear and thrust down into the drum.

  He was a supply staff sergeant, so he knew enough to know that diesel was considerably less flammable than gasoline. That was why the army favored it. But he also knew that it was combustible enough to fire in an engine, so it did burn. He tried holding the end of the hose in one hand, but then he couldn’t prime the pump, so he dropped the hose onto the straw matting and pumped the handle with as much force as he could muster. He felt like he had just woken from a deep sleep, dazed and unsure, time slipping away and then returning. When the fuel began running through the hose, he pulled it out to its full length, reaching the midpoint of the building. He sprayed the straw flooring like a gardener watering his flowers. He continued pouring the diesel out as he worked his way back toward the window on the side of the building where he had parked the truck. Once he reached the window, he threw the hose back into the darkness.

  The staff sergeant took a matchbook from his pocket. He had heard that people didn’t smoke much anymore. That wasn’t his experience. Army guys spent a lot of time sitting around doing not much at all, and there was only so much make-work that the army could come up with. Lots of guys played video games. Some guys read. And plenty of guys smoked. So he always carried matches. He tried lig
hting a match with one hand but couldn’t. Then he tried moving his left arm to hold the matchbook, but it offered nothing but stabbing pain.

  He finally put the book between his teeth and struck the match with his good hand. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the match burst to life under his nose. He tossed the match into a pool of diesel and watched as it fizzled out on contact. He snarled and struck another, then bit down on the matchbook in his mouth as he crouched and set fire to the straw. The dry flooring took the flame and it crackled and spat as it heated the diesel into action. The staff sergeant watched it for a moment, the way people stare at newborn fire. It slowly ebbed across the floor in a line, separating the room into two spaces. One for the staff sergeant and one for the traitor, like it was protecting the staff sergeant from the dead man.

  But then the fire turned on its master. It split from its line and spread out like points on a compass. The staff sergeant realized too late that the fire had cut off his route to the doorway. As the slow-burning diesel filled the room with black smoke, he felt his lungs tighten and his eyes burn more than from sweat alone. He stumbled to the window on the side of the building. Right outside he could see the truck and its cargo waiting in the shade, the air-conditioned cabin of the truck calling him.