Lost Luggage (John Flynn Thrillers Book 5)

  Lost Luggage

  A John Flynn Thriller

  AJ Stewart

  Jacaranda Drive

  For all those who need the escape.

  And Heather.

  Chapter One

  Baghdad, Iraq

  The Green Zone was no more, at least according to the media. The international zone in Baghdad had returned to the people of Iraq, and the concrete blast barriers had been hauled away. But the area still held that air of superiority that embassy areas had in every city. Perhaps it was the nature of diplomats who carried passports that put them above the law.

  It certainly felt busier to John Flynn. The last time he had been in Iraq, the Green Zone had been like its own country, but now taxis and dusty cars streamed along streets and past the Victory Arch that had been sealed off from the locals for sixteen years.

  Flynn and Aleksy Gorski sat in a café on the opposite side of the road from the US Embassy compound that had once been Saddam’s presidential palace. Flynn sipped thick black coffee despite the growing heat, and Gorski drank French bottled water.

  Both men watched the street with a casual vigilance. Despite the occasional attack, the area was safer than the downtown areas of many American cities, but old habits died hard. They sipped their drinks in the shade and waited, as they had waited so many times before.

  That they were back in Iraq at all was a cruel twist of fate. After helping one of their old Legion brothers with some trouble in his village in Denmark, they had followed one of the men responsible for threatening the life of their old friend and dispensed some justice of their own. Now they waited for a familiar face and made plans to be anywhere else but Baghdad in the summer.

  “I hear Portofino is nice this time of year,” said Gorski.

  “Too touristy for my taste,” said Flynn.

  Gorski nodded his agreement. Perhaps it was something about having been in the French Foreign Legion. Living in such close quarters in a regiment of men from all four corners of the globe offered enough exposure to humanity for a lifetime. It was no wonder that so many of their brothers preferred their own company and a quieter pace of life after their discharge.

  Flynn saw the man on the sunlit street before he stepped into the relative cool of the café. He looked older, more than the ten years since they had last met. Flynn had always thought there was something about this dry and timeless land that aged people and places at a faster rate than the rest of the world, and this man might have been the evidence.

  Flynn stood and the motion drew the man’s eye, and he pointed as a waiter approached him to indicate that he was meeting someone.

  Gorski stood as the man reached their table, and each of them took turns offering the newcomer a quick hug and a slap on the back.

  “Yusuf, my friend,” said Flynn.

  “I did not think my eyes would ever fall upon you again, sayidi,” said Yusuf.

  “Nor I,” said Flynn, gesturing for Yusuf to sit with them.

  A waiter approached and asked if they would care to eat. They ordered some falafel and dolmas and more coffee.

  As Yusuf spoke with the waiter, Flynn studied his face. He was still thin to the point of looking brittle but with strong, sinewy arms. His heavy mustache that had been jet black the last time they met was now salt-and-pepper.

  “So what brings you back to Baghdad?” asked Yusuf.

  “We were just helping out an old friend,” said Flynn. “And you? How is life treating you?”

  “I am here, so I am fine. But I owe you my most humble thanks. For my daughter.”

  “You owe me nothing,” said Flynn. “It is I who owe you. So how is she?”

  “She finished college and got a good job. She has a green card now. She’s living in Atlanta.”

  “That’s great,” he said.

  Flynn sipped his coffee and watched the other man. His face was a combination of pride and abashment, the sense that his daughter had gotten out and found something more, mixed with the knowledge that another man had paid for it all to happen.

  But he was wrong. Flynn had provided the money, but Yusuf had earned it. He had saved Flynn’s life, not in some metaphorical sense but quite literally. On their last mission in Iraq, Flynn would have died in the desert if Yusuf had not dragged him to safety, patched him up, and shuttled him to the Saudi border. Flynn had created a scholarship fund via a Bermudan holding company to repay in some way the debt he owed, and he funded it with some of the ill-gotten gains that his unit had confiscated from the terrorists they hunted around the world.

  “Have you had the chance to visit?” asked Gorski.

  “No,” said Yusuf. “Maybe someday soon.”

  “Visa trouble?” asked Flynn.

  “Before, yes, but not now. After you left Iraq, I did some work for the Americans for a few years, and not long ago they gave me and my wife visas to emigrate.”

  “Will you do that?”

  “I don’t know. My wife longs to see our daughter, of course, but this is our home. It is troubled, yes, but it is home.” He sipped his coffee. “Perhaps one day.”

  “If you need anything, please let me know,” said Flynn.

  Yusuf nodded as if the thought embarrassed him.

  “You had any trouble since we left?” asked Gorski.

  “Trouble?”

  “Because of us, because of what happened.”

  Yusuf looked at the men as if assessing whether to answer. “Not trouble. But men came, asked questions.”

  “When?”

  “At the time, and every now and then.”

  Flynn and Gorski exchanged a glance.

  “What did they want?”

  “They ask questions. What I knew, where you were, how I got the money for my daughter to study in America. I tell them I knew nothing. My daughter is smart and got a scholarship. The rest? I drove here, I drove there, then you left. That’s all I know.”

  “I hope us being here now doesn’t cause you any problems,” said Flynn.

  Yusuf shrugged. “Trouble comes and goes in Baghdad. It has for thousands of years, and it will long after I am gone.”

  Trouble had come on their previous visit. They had been tasked with finding a shipment of suspected arms being sold during the US withdrawal. Their team had tracked down a US quartermaster involved in the trade and intercepted a shipping container being delivered to him. Then things had gone bad. It turned out some very important but unseen people were invested in getting the arms wherever they were supposed to go. Trouble rained down on Flynn’s team. Suddenly all eyes—French, American, Iraqi, even UN—were on them. Their commander, Colonel Laporte, ordered them out, to disband before they were killed, which Flynn almost was. But he was able to send the shipping container away, to make it lost, he hoped, never to be found again.

  “When was the last time someone asked you about it?” said Gorski.

  “This is why I came to see you, my friends. It has been a few years. I came to believe that they had given up on it. But two days ago, I learned they had not.”

  “Two days ago?” said Gorski. “Who gets that concerned about a shipment of arms after ten years? The whole place was awash with military surplus.”

  Flynn glanced at his friend. He could see in Gorski’s eyes that despite the words coming out of his mouth, even he wasn’t buying what he was saying. Because they both knew that only one of their team had seen inside the container, and what he saw was a security system designed to flag the GPS coordinates when the container was opened. So they hadn’t opened it. The truth was, they didn’t know what was inside the container. Not for sure. They had been told arms of some kind, so they worked with that assumpti
on. But Gorski was right. Who worried about a shipment of guns ten years after the fact?

  “Are you safe?” asked Flynn.

  “Yes,” said Yusuf. “I have seen all this before.”

  “It might get worse. If we decide to find what they seek.”

  “I understand. I have, what would you call it? A backup plan.”

  The men finished their lunch talking about the changes the city had seen over the ten years since they had last been together. When they were done, the three men walked out into the bright sunshine and stood beside the modern multi-lane road that cut through a landscape that looked so old as to be timeless.

  “You have my email?” Flynn asked.

  Yusuf nodded and tapped his head.

  “If you need anything, okay?”

  Flynn and Gorski each shook hands with Yusuf and then watched him walk away toward his vehicle. Flynn looked around. He couldn’t believe he was back, and every fiber of his being wanted to leave. He noted five different men standing alone at points along and across the street. There was nothing unusual about men standing around in Baghdad, where people often seemed to be killing time. But now every face had an edge to it, each pair of eyes felt like they were trained on him.

  He turned back to Gorski, whose face was resolute.

  “We have to find this thing, don’t we,” said his Polish friend.

  “I hope not.”

  Chapter Two

  Basra, Iraq

  In 2011 the airport at Basra had been the British military’s southern base of operations since the invasion, until they handed it over to the Americans prior to the British pullout. The entire place had looked like a war zone, filled with concrete blast barriers and military vehicles. Now the barriers were gone and the vehicles were mostly civilian, and the airport looked like just an airport.

  Flynn rubbed his eyes as he drove. It was a five-hour drive from Baghdad to Basra in the south of the country, and he felt tired and unsure of the way forward. They cruised around, noting that the security was nothing more than they would expect to find at any international airport, then they began a long, slow sweep around the area that had once been Contingency Operating Base Basra.

  The landscape looked unfamiliar to them. Many of the buildings that the Americans had taken over remained, but now they had once again become part of the city rather than part of a military installation.

  Flynn drove toward the quadrant southeast of the airport. This area looked remarkably similar to how it had been ten years earlier. It was a section of town that was common around airports across the world. Stout and nondescript buildings, small warehouses, and hangar facilities all designed either for the support of the aircraft and passengers that came in and out or for the housing of goods that did the same.

  Flynn crawled slowly through the streets as he regained his bearings and allowed Gorski to regain his. Flynn had done reconnaissance on these streets during the last operation, but it had been Gorski who had delivered the shipping container that had ultimately been the cause of their unit’s demise.

  “You recognize anything?” asked Flynn.

  “It’s coming back to me,” said Gorski. “Slowly. Turn left down there.”

  Flynn followed Gorski’s direction and drove down the street lined with small trucks and delivery vans, until Gorski asked him to stop. Flynn pulled over but didn’t cut the engine.

  Gorski was looking at a small warehouse facility across the street. There was a wide asphalt concourse beside the building, plenty of room for trucks to park and pull wide circles so they could back up to the warehouse for loading.

  “This is it,” said Gorski. “In there. I left the shipment right there.”

  “On the concourse?” asked Flynn.

  “No. On the other side of the warehouse, just out of view.”

  They sat on the street for a few minutes, watching as if their minds might be able to travel back a decade and see something that would help them. But they didn’t. All Gorski could offer was a shrug of his shoulders, so Flynn took one last look at the area and then drove away.

  They found a hotel not far from the airport. Even the hotels felt different now. Fewer uniforms and battle fatigues, more suits. They each got a room and took a shower, then reconvened in the hotel bar. Despite being a majority Muslim country, concessions were always made to Western values—and Western money. The consumption of alcohol was no exception, except when it was.

  The two men took a table in the corner of the room. Gorski cooled off with a bottle of Carlsberg beer, and Flynn, as ever, drank the local coffee.

  “So what do we know?” asked Gorski.

  “Not much,” said Flynn. “We know we were brought to Iraq to track down arms that were being stolen from the US during their drawdown and that were supposedly destined for Afghanistan. But according to the US military intelligence officer I met back then, the shipment that he had traced had originated in France. And even that wasn’t the same shipment that we discovered being handed over to Staff Sergeant Dennison.”

  “Plus, if what we know is right, that shipment was going the wrong way, remember? It wasn’t leaving an American base in Iraq and heading toward Afghanistan. It had come the other way—across the border from Iran. Or at least the driver did,” said Gorski, with a wave of his hand to order another beer.

  “Right. So we don’t know which shipment we actually intercepted, and we don’t know where it came from.”

  “And what about the who?” asked Gorski.

  “Well, the US end of the deal, Staff Sergeant Dennison, he’s dead. And the private security guys who were after us, who tried to kill me and Special Agent Hutton, they’re dead, too.”

  “And you’re sure of that?”

  “One hundred percent. And then there’s anyone involved with getting the shipment out of Iraq. There’s me, and you. You left the shipment at the warehouse, and I arranged to have an old colleague who then worked for a private security company to pick it up and fly it out to the Legion base in Gabon, Africa. And I then asked another brother stationed in Gabon to make that container get lost. So I wouldn’t know where it was, and you wouldn’t know where it was. The guy who sent it out of Iraq wouldn’t know where it went, and the guy who would know was never here.”

  “But you said that guy was now dead?”

  “Both of them. The contractor died in a car accident, and the legionnaire died in a training mishap.”

  “Does that feel suspicious to you?”

  “It looks it, on the face of it. But the fact is, automobile accidents happen, and more people in the military die during peacetime from training accidents than any other cause. I looked into it, to the extent that I could, back when they first found me in San Francisco and came after me. I knew then that they didn’t know where the shipment was, and I thought maybe I could find it, but with both of my contacts gone, it was a dead end. It was then, it is now, and that was kind of the whole point.”

  They sipped their drinks and thought on it for a while, then Gorski held up his beer and pointed at his old unit leader. “Just thinking about how we found the shipment in the first place. You had a meeting with the guy from US military intelligence, right?”

  “Major Bradshaw, that’s right. He was working through back channels with our Colonel Laporte. They both feared that someone higher up their respective chains of command was somehow involved, and Bradshaw had asked Laporte to bring us in, since our unit didn’t officially exist. Bradshaw was why we were there in the first place.”

  “I was not at that meeting,” said Gorski.

  “He had satellite imagery of a shipment. Whether it was the one we intercepted is anyone’s guess now.”

  “Okay, but what I’m wondering is, if they could track a specific shipment into the country, could we track the shipment going out?”

  Flynn thought on it for a moment. “I don’t see how.”

  “We know where the shipment was. I left it at that warehouse. We even know exactly when it got th
ere.”

  “No, I mean, I don’t see how we would get access to that kind of satellite imagery. We’re not tapped into that anymore. We don’t have any contacts in military intelligence, or anyone else in the US military for that matter.”

  “What about the FBI? You’re still in touch with Special Agent Hutton, aren’t you?”

  “I can be, but I more or less promised her that I would keep her out of this kind of thing. I involved her when they came after me last time, and I put her in a lot of danger. Besides, she’s not with the FBI anymore. She runs her own security business now.”

  “But she might have contacts?”

  “I don’t think the FBI is running satellites over Basra. And she had no more contacts in the military intelligence community than I did.”

  Gorski shrugged and sipped his beer. “It was just an idea.”

  “I know. Keep them coming. We need every idea we can come up with right now.”

  “Satellites,” said Gorski.

  “What?”

  “We’re talking about satellites. The Americans had satellites over that entire area. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. And why?”

  “Because they were running military operations there.”

  “And because of the oil,” said Gorski. “Let’s face it, all of this business was about oil. Not freedom, not liberty. There were a hundred other places around the world that were losing those things, and we served in half of them. But no one was fighting wars there, because they had no oil.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “We were in Iraq. French interests were there. Yeah, I get it that France was not officially involved with the whole invasion and takedown of Saddam. But that doesn’t mean there were no French interests there. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place, would we?”

  “I still don’t see your point.”

  “My point is, if the Americans had satellites up there, maybe the French did, too.”