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“We need it to look legit,” Dorrich said. “If we’re going to tell them there was a firefight here, it makes sense one of us at least would get tagged. No one’s going to question this. She’s a colonel’s daughter, for chrissake.”
Breecher’s eyes were big and wild, her bloody hand gripping Master’s shoulder, her eyes on Nick, pleading as she fought to speak through the pain.
“I’m sorry, Breecher,” Master said. “It’ll all be worth it. I promise. It’ll all be worth it.”
“Come on,” Dorrich said and grabbed Nick’s shoulder and pushed him toward the house. “We have to keep moving.”
Nick entered the house and walked through the room full of dead family members. His eyes were fixed on his own feet, and yet small clues to the horror intruded into the edges of his vision. A tiny hand flopped open, unmoving. A bare foot. Someone lying on their side, hair splayed over the stained rug. Dorrich led Nick into a large room filled with rugs, blankets, pillows. He shoved back a few, searching for something on theground. All the while, Dorrich had one hand pressed against the radio on his helmet.
“Delta 6 receiving fire at a structure approximately five miles north-northwest of base, requesting immediate assistance. One man down, over.”
Finally Dorrich’s finger caught on a structure in the bare earth. He lifted a wood panel and flipped it over, then started dragging dusty duffel bags out of a wide hole in the ground.
They were faded camo-print bags marked with big black block letters.
U.S. ARMY.
Nick came when Dorrich beckoned him, receiving the bag Dorrich tossed him.
“Hurry up. Grab and go, Jones! Grab and go!”
Nick bent and opened the bag. Dirty, wrinkled bills, thousands of them, secured in bundles with elastic bands. American dollars. In his dreamy, disassociated state, he reached into the bag and felt the corners and edges of the stacks of cash creep up his arm. A depthless bag of money trying to suck him in by the wrist.
“Ghost money,” he said.
Dorrich nodded.
Nick had heard rumors fluttering around base ever since he arrived, about CIA payments to village elders, local non-Taliban warlords, and agents who channeled money all the way to President Hamid Karzai’s palace. Six months earlier, outside Tezin, he’d lain on his bunk listening to Dorrich reading aNew York Timesarticle aloud to his team. The article claimed that Americans were paying cash for safe passage through Taliban red zones. The reporter had described plastic shopping bags,briefcases, duffel bags full of cash being delivered in the dead of night. Army patrols were marking their vehicles with safe codes provided by the elders, so that rebels could see them with binoculars and know not to engage. Master had been in a fury as he listened, pacing the room, his fists balled and tucked into his armpits as though to stop himself beating the shit out of someone.
“I didn’t come here to hand American tax dollars over to the goddamn Taliban!” he’d raged. “I came here to kill those motherfuckers!”
Dorrich was shoving another bag at Nick now, loading two bags onto his own shoulders.
“How much is here?” Nick asked.
“Should be about four million,” Dorrich said. “There’s been a bottleneck further up the line. One of the guys who’s supposed to bring this money to the higher-ups in Kabul has been skimming off the top, so all the money’s pooled here until they can figure out who the thief is. This represents nine months’ worth of safe passage payments.”
“Jesus,” Nick said. Dorrich grinned and slapped his back, thinking, Nick supposed, that he was marveling at the money. At what a million dollars could mean for someone like him, a high school dropout from West Baltimore with few prospects back home except more deployments to this desert wasteland to fight in a war he didn’t half understand.
But Nick wasn’t marveling at that. He was marveling at the wastefulness of it all. The lives snuffed out in the other room. Breecher, and what a gunshot wound at close range to the abdomen would mean for her chances of survival. He marveled at Master and Dorrich’s apparent complete disregard for thedanger this would put Americans into in the coming months. Safe passages now unsafe again. He marveled at the years he saw stretching outward and away from him in this moment, years in which he would have to keep quiet somehow about what he was doing.
Nick could hear choppers on the wind.
“Let’s go.” Dorrich pulled at him. “We gotta stash the bags before they get here.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
AT SUNRISE, NICK went to the second-floor bathroom in the Inn by the Sea, stepped up onto the toilet, and popped open the access into the crawl space beneath Neddy Ives’s room. Effie was on watch across the hall. He was sure he’d heard Clay Spears’s lumbering gait somewhere on the lower floors. If there was anyone else in the house, they seemed to be asleep.
Nick reached into the dark and dragged the old duffel bag across a beam to himself, then sat on the edge of the bathtub with it. He could still hear those choppers. He remembered showing members of Bravo 5 through to the room in the goat farmer’s house with the empty pit in it.Nothing here when we arrived. Just a hole in the ground.
Probably drugs,someone guessed.
Nick unzipped the duffel bag and looked at the cash. His cut. Just under a million, so he was told. He hadn’t spent a single dime. Hadn’t unzipped the bag once since he’d retrievedit from an airport locker Dorrich had given him the code to, a month and a half after he returned from his last tour. It had been Masters’s job to retrieve the bags from where they’d been stashed on the night of the massacre, not far from the farmhouse, in the desert, and get them safely into the US, hidden in the engine well of a broken-down troop carrier.
Dorrich’s intel had been sound. Months later, as they sat side by side in a hall at some processing center in Arizona, waiting to describe the massacre to an inquiring committee, Dorrich had told Nick about the farmer he and Master had come across while walking by the side of the road to Kabul. He and Master had been on a supply run. They’d stopped and talked to the guy because they were bored. Dorrich told Nick about the nervous chitchat the man had engaged in with them, the suggestion that ghost money was being funneled through a nearby valley. It had taken months of research, Dorrich said. Months of lies, secret rendezvous outside the base; bribes to farmers, roadmen, bandits; sorting the rumors from the lies from the cover stories. Dorrich said he had wanted to bring Nick and Breecher in on the plan from the beginning. But it was Master who didn’t trust them to go through with it. Nick was a soft touch, and convincing Breecher to risk her body like that would have been a hard sell.
Easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission,Dorrich theorized,and a million dollars bought a whole lot of forgiveness.
