I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (4 page)

Snatching up a bundle, he flipped it at Spencer to catch and hit Spencer’s midsection. Spencer let it fall on the tent’s canvas floor.

Miller leaned over, looked at the money, and his tone changed. “Take a taste, Sergeant,” he told Spencer aggressively. “You earned it.”

Afif,
the
translator,
instantly
poked
his
head
inside
the
tent.
Even
in
the
dimming
light,
Spencer
saw
Afif’s
eyes
lock
onto
the
bills.
Afif
shifted
his
yellow
jackal
eyes
up
at
Spencer,
his
hard
glare
communicating
volumes—a
man
who
sold
out
to
the
invader,
a
man
who
turned
his
back
on
his
tribe,
his
village,
his
clan;
no
translation
necessary.
Spencer
closed
the
tent
flap
in
front
of
the
Ismaili’s
face.
Men
like
Afif
needed
money;
without
money
the
Pathans
would
chop
through
his
ribcage
and
tear
his
heart
out
the
second
he
was
beyond
the
American
protection.

Spencer snarled “You pick that shit up and get it out of here. I’m not touching that. ”
The money? That was not OK.

“Evaporation,” Miller insisted. “Lost in transit.”

Miller
moved
tens
of
millions
in
cash
money
as
part
of
his
regular
routine.
After
the
first
IED
rattled
him
to
the
core,
he
pilfered
two
$10,000
bundles,
figuring
his
life
was
worth
a
lot
more
than
that,
and
then
he
waited
anxiously
for
four
weeks
and
almost
peed
himself
when
he
had
to
stand
before
that
same
governor.
Nobody
even
hinted
at
the
missing
$20,000.
After
that,
Miller
repeated
the
approach
at
another
drop
and
then
another,
and
before
long
his
cut
was
a
regular
commission.
He
had
funds
moved
into
Luxemburg,
in
Macau,
in
Uruguay;
he
even
had
amassed
$80K
in
Guinea
Bissau.
Aid
money,
capital
projects,
narco
funds…
it
all
spent
the
same.

“Pick it up and get it the fuck out,” Spencer repeated. His tone made it clear that he wasn’t going to say it again, but that had no effect upon Miller. “That’s none of my business,” Spencer growled. “I do the job, that’s it.”

“You don’t like me much, do you?” Miller observed offhandedly. He looked around, vaguely remembering how he had a bottle somewhere.

“Get off your high horse,” Miller grumbled. He threw a second bundle in Spencer’s direction. “It’s shrinkage. Goes with the territory.”

Spencer watched Miller patting around, finally locating the bottle between his legs.

“Is this all a joke for you?” Spencer asked Miller. “Do you stand for anything?”

Miller’s bloodshot eyes wandered up to Spencer’s face. “Just what do you think you stand for?” Miller challenged.

“I’m a soldier. I serve this country.”

“Afghanistan?” Miller teased.

“You fucking know what I mean!” Spencer reached out his boot and flicked the bundle soccer-style back at his handler. Something about the physical action made him recoil.
Manchester United
.

“It’s only money,” Miller chortled. “You think you’re better than me? You’re not better than me.” Miller’s fingers found the bottle. He gulped the last two fingers then wiped the back of his hand across his angry mouth. Miller sat up and grew rigid.

“Sergeant, don’t sit so tall in the saddle. I pass orders to you and a dozen more killers. Not one of you motherfuckers ever said ‘no.’ You want to be here!” Miller griped on. “Do you even know how fucked up that is? No, not you, ’cause you’re the Spear Point, the Warrior.” Miller ran his fingers through his thinning hair, and then swept up handfuls of cash just to let them drop again. “I’m twenty-nine years old. Did you know that? Twenty-nine. I look forty!”

His eyes fixed on the bundles where the two had tumbled to the canvas floor.

Spencer eyed his Barrett but kept it together. “Don’t get me involved,” he warned Miller, who acted like he could care less.

“Nobody trusts an honest man,” Miller scolded. “Oil or no oil, Sergeant, this whole place is a profit center. None of us would ever be here if it wasn’t. Spending trillions on a no-win war for a place where armies had been going to die for two thousand years? Come on. Give me a break.”

Spencer hovered above the cot and Miller, looking down through the comb-over at Miller’s sunburned red scalp. The thought flashed, just for a split second, that he could reach out and snap Miller’s neck.

“I am not involved.”

Miller went back to scrolling through sat footage and drone views, but reached down to the $10,000 bundles of cash. His fingers rubbed and caressed the bills before he reached them out, holding the money toward Spencer.

He directed Spencer to “take the money, Sergeant.” This time it sounded more like an order than a request.

Spencer lifted his hands in the air, refusing even to touch it.

Miller’s face twisted. The veins thumped in his neck.

“Everybody takes a taste, Sergeant,” Miller insisted. “It’s the way it is.”

Spencer didn’t budge.

“Spencer, you’re an idiot”, Miller grumbled, rocking forward until he could swing his feet onto the ground.

“Boy Scout,” Miller told Spencer, phrasing it as a toast before taking a last pull from the bottle.

He made an effort to stand then gave up.

“Get me a sandwich,” he yelled out to the translator, who was positioned, kneeling, just outside the tent. Miller was obviously agitated, both at Spencer’s refusal and at having drunkenly run off his mouth. This was more than a contest of wills.

He focused toward Spencer with one eye open. “What do you think you do, Master Sergeant?” Miller asked.

“My job.”

Miller spit up slightly then he spat in Spencer’s direction.

“Your job. And that is?”

“Killing the enemy.”

“Ha!” Miller halted himself, lifted the bottle to his lips, and then looked at the damage he had done to its contents.

Miller’s chin dropped to his chest. He began expostulating with his hands alongside his voice. “Sergeant, there’s you and there’s the real world. Here is how the real world works. Somebody somewhere in this fucked up place pisses off somebody else, and then one names the other as a Taliban insurgent. That’s our first tip. Tip number one. Then that guy, the bastard who pointed first, he goes and he gets one of his thousand cousins to contact us and that cousin names the same person. Tip number two. Next cousin, next tip. Three tips and we have a winner! Three tips, the Haji goes on the list, and you get a target.

“Some of them must be Taliban I suppose,” he continued, shaking his head, “but mostly it’s one Rag Head trying to get some other Rag Head’s farm or there’s some other shit between them that has zip to do with you and me or the war. Anyway. Bang, three tips, name on a list, they give me the name, I find the closest one of you guys, you blow his head off, and,
hakuna matata
, it’s the circle of life.”

Miller reached for a cigarette and patted himself down to find his lighter.

“Not in here,” Spencer snarled. “Smoke outside.”

“Jesus. Blowing people’s heads off is OK, but a little second hand smoke…” Miller made another effort to get upright, managed to swing himself into a sitting position and slowly shoved bundles of cash back into the courier bag.

“Money,” Miller announced, with the conviction of a drunken sage. “Money, money, money,” he repeated. “Widgets. Guns, heroin, God. Everybody’s selling something.” Miller rolled toward Spencer and glared through a bloodshot eyeball. “Mister high and mighty Zen warrior, Master Sergeant. So full of yourself.” Miller poked his finger in the air pointed generally in Spencer’s direction. “Take the fucking money.”

Spencer shook his head.

“The Russians hate heroin,” Miller explained, waving his hands to emphasize that Spencer should wait, that it was going to make sense. That he really should take the money.

“The Russians… the Russians share their border with Afghanistan. Afghanistan grows 80 percent of the world’s opium supply. Do you know that we used to spray the poppy fields, but that’s all stopped? Opium. Heroin. Big profits. Four billion a year in foreign sales, their one and only export product until we leave and the Chinese come in to mine away their resources. Karzai makes billions, the farmers don’t hate us, and we flood heroin in to fuck the Russians.”

Miller tried again to fish out a cigarette before Spencer leaned forward to snatch the pack from his hands. He glared. “Hell, you want to eradicate the opium, you bring back the Taliban. Best narcotics cops in history. Karzai’s brothers want to run everything, except maybe not every district lets the brothers fix the market price for raw opium. So some farmer, say, wants to run a cooperative in his village and get a better price than Karzai pays out. Karzai or the brother has the cousins call in three tips, the farmer gets on the list, and you and I get tasked to blow him up.

“Sorry. That’s too messy for you, Sergeant. You don’t blow shit up, you ‘eradicate the target.’”

Miller pressed himself up out of the cot with bottle in hand, saw again that it was empty, and flung it at his translator outside.

“But it isn’t clean,” he went on. “It stinks. That stink is dead bodies. It comes off people. Somebody got pissed off and now they’re rotting meat. You did that. Own it.”

Miller rocked himself upright, held out his arms to get his balance, and then spun himself around like a whirling Dervish.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,” he sang out sarcastically. “Take one down and pass it around, and then there’s ninety-eight more.

“It’s all just bullshit,” Miller explained. “None of this makes any difference. Take the fucking money. We’re going to leave here and it will all go right back to shit. Karzai will move to London or Paris or buy a penthouse in New York City. It’s markets, Sergeant. Commerce; everything else makes zero sense; the second you put a pin in it, this war pops like a great big balloon.

“You’ve got eyes, don’t you? The United States spends trillions so the big boys back home and here get to make their billions. Me? I’m just scraping this little tiny crumb off the bottom of the pie pan. It’s evaporation, barely a commission.

“Americans don’t turn down money. Military contractors sell $60,000 Toyota pickups and five-dollar sodas. Colonels and generals get seven-figure paychecks.

“Take the fucking money,” Miller urged him. “Are you a fundamentalist or are you a righteous American capitalist? It’s money. When it’s there in front of your face, you fucking take it! Do you really believe you can conduct yourself honorably? Really? And I saw the Blessed Virgin on the TP when I wiped my ass this morning! When the whole thing put together is a puss-ridden tumor, there’s no honor. Take the fucking money, Sergeant. Pick it up.”

Spencer stared blankly at the clean, crisp bundles, lying green like Kryptonite. A slide show history began to snap through his head, a zombie army of 131 dead targets that threatened to break through the walls of his psyche. All the training that he had done, all the exercise and focus and precision that sustained him; still shots of faces penetrating through the lens of his scope; all dead, but coming alive in a ruminating rotation.

Bullshit! You did your job, the job you’ve been trained to get done.

Money doesn’t sustain grunts humping 120 pounds across mountainsides, going solo sixty miles inside tribal areas. Money meant zip out there.

“Take your dirty money and get the fuck out of my place.”

Miller looked over the prefab shelter with disgust, grumbled something incoherent, rocked himself upright, and then scratched at the air to find a wall before stumbling out of the tent.

Spencer was tired enough to sleep for days. He knew he had to recharge, but every camp noise kept him awake and thinking into the night. The container was pierced, it wouldn’t hold water. The only way to fix the hole was to stop guys like Miller. Could he kill another kid on Miller’s orders?

Miller awakened inside the back of a Bradley. He stretched out a furry, dehydrated tongue then reached underneath his stomach for what was jabbing his insides and came up with a wrapped bundle of new one-hundred dollar bills. He studied them until his eyes cleared, and then random snippets from his drunken ramblings
came back to him
.
He stumbled out the Bradley’s rear hatch into the black night air. Through the darkness, he tried to make out the outline of the tent where Spencer was finally lying asleep on his stomach.

“You fucking idiot,” he grumbled through a brutal hangover.

“Best case scenario if he talks, they transfer my ass.” That would be it for handling the cash. In small increments he had amassed nearly $600,000. Thanks to his big mouth he might as well have handed the key to Spencer.

“Crap.” The crime wasn’t taking the cash; his bosses were probably taking a hell of a lot more themselves. Putting the spotlight on the skimming?
That
was something else.
That
was a capital offense. His ass would get capped and nobody would ever think twice. Miller decided that the Boy Scout was going to talk. He would disappear in a shallow grave.

Miller gripped his knees and hovered over Afif’s sleeping mat. He fumed alcohol into the tribesman’s dark face; it was pouring out with every whispered order. He tugged a bundle of bills out of his shirt, felt its weight and then stopped himself from handing over the entire wad. Three bills were enough. Miller peeled off twice that, began to count it into Afif’s rutted palm, then gave up and crushed it in as Afif’s fist closed around the money.

Miller reached his hand over his own mouth, the universal sign for silence, and then pointed toward the wide-bladed steel dagger ground down from a Soviet bayonet that the Ismaili always carried at his hip. He missed and nearly fell forward before Afif caught him by his elbow to keep Miller upright.

“Kill him. Quietly.”

Afif’s turbaned head nodded. He understood.

Across the camp a Humvee fired up and headlights came on. Miller looked up then back. Afif and his knife had disappeared into the night.

The Ismaili lifted his loose trousers and squatted down outside Spencer’s tent, with only the canvas between them, listening to Spencer’s steady, undisturbed breathing rhythms. He withdrew the blade and felt his thumb along both edges. He would have honed it ahead of time if he had been killing a sheep. But cutting into a sheep’s woolen throat is harder than a soft and bare American. The tribesman held the blade out from his body, choked his right-hand grip against the hilt, and crooked his wrist so the blade and his arm formed a vee. He pulled backward, practicing the motion of ripping up through jugular veins and carotid arteries and the crunchy resistance of windpipe cartilage in between. Wrist tight, right arm pulling up. Pressing his left hand down on the back of Spencer’s head while the knife plunged and he yanked back.