Security stepped up and dragged Dwayne to the deck. And then more security. The Vegas cops were called. Dwayne came around in the back of a police cruiser. No one ever told him how many real cops and rent-a-cops it took to get him there. His best guess was that they were at company strength.
The sweet life was over and there was no going back.
He’d banked thirty grand, but half of that had gone to a lawyer who got his case dismissed. And he’d run through the rest fast enough unless a paying job came up soon. The dwindling bank balance and the clothes on his back were all he had. Everything else was back at the boss’s house in Malibu, and he wasn’t going there again. The restraining order made sure of that.
Dwayne camped at a sixty-bucks-a-night trucker’s hotel out on the 15 near Nellis. He bought some clothes at a big ’n’ tall and picked up a Car Trader to find a new ride, but that just made him think about the H2 and the Viper the boss used to let him borrow. Mostly he drank beers and sunned by the scummy pool out back of the motel and listened to the heavies flying overhead to and from the miles-long strips at the airbase a few miles north. Took him back to Kandahar when his only worry was an IED. Now he had real shit on his mind. Like the rest of his life. He lay there and sucked back on his Coors and sniffed the air, rich with the tang of high octane aviation fuel cast off by the traffic booming into Nellis overhead.
A lot of days went by like that. Easy and slow.
The nights were longer. He was dating a waitress at the Hooters on Tropicana. But she started giving him shit about getting a job, so he cut that off. She was part of his downtime. He didn’t need to hear how he fucked up when he was trying to forget exactly that.
So he had plenty of spare time to review the facts and weigh his options. He’d fucked himself out of a golden opportunity. Really, truly fucked himself. A phone call to Sullivan confirmed that. Danny Sullivan told Dwayne he was blackballed, burned, and generally filed under bad news.
The boss had seen to that. No one would touch him now. And if Dwayne pushed it there was a phony statutory rape charge hanging fire back in Mississippi. Not even the outfits that prided themselves on being bad boys would touch him—the ones with foreign contracts to watch over oil fields or mining operations. Dwayne even thought about re-upping for Rangers, or maybe even regular army. He could easily be an instructor at Benning or elsewhere. He put that decision off till he was down to five large in the checking account. He’d pissed in his own pool and had no one to blame but himself.
He ran ten miles every morning before the sun came up. A shower, shit, and shave, and he walked across the parking lot to the IHOP for coffee and eggs. He was avoiding Hooters for now. Dwayne was in his usual booth studying the Car Trader and sipping his second refill. The Trader was two months old by now and most of the cars probably sold. He only brought it so he’d have somewhere to look while he ate. Someone slid onto the bench seat across from him.
“Dwayne Tyler Roenbach?” asked the man. “Not if you’re a lawyer,” Dwayne replied. He didn’t look up. 2008 Chev Avlnche. Lw milge. 350. 4wd. BO
The man laughed, then stopped when Dwayne didn’t join him.
“Pat Mulroy suggested I see you,” the man said. He was on the underfed side and peered at Dwayne from behind eyeglasses. His hands looked soft and they twitched on the tabletop.
“Where do you know Pat from?” Dwayne folded the Car Trader closed.
“He was a consultant on some government projects I was working on,” the man said. “I’m private sector now but when I had need of a certain kind of help I contacted Pat.”
“How is he?”
“If you know Pat, then you know he never says how he is. Or where he is.”
Dwayne knew. That is, he knew that no one knew much about Patrick Mulroy that Mulroy didn’t want them to know.
“He said you were a big help to him a few years ago,” the man continued.
Peshawar. One evil night. Mulroy was in the kind of corner that only a platoon of Rangers could get him out of. They left half the unit behind that night. And ten times that number of jihadis.
“So, let’s cut the shit and the mini-moves,” said Dwayne. “Who are you?”
“I’m Dr. Morris Tauber, and I need—”
“Someone who can keep their head when it turns nasty,” Dwayne finished for him.
“To put a finer point on it, Mr. Roenbach.” Tauber’s nervous smile evaporated. “I need a man who can take a small team into the most dangerous place on the planet and bring all of them back alive. No back-up. No support. No communications. There and back without incident or casualty. And keep it all to himself. Forever.”
“Like where? There’s a few places I’d rather not revisit.”
“I can assure you.” Tauber’s nervous smile returned. “That your assignment will not take you anywhere you have ever been to before.”
The drive was dull and Dwayne dozed through most of it. Doc Tauber wanted to keep his mystery intact and he had little to say. Their route took them into the afternoon sun riding west out of Vegas on a two-lane as straight as a string in a Land Rover badly in need of an alignment. The two men had zero in common. They talked some about their hometowns and the weather in Nevada. They ran out of small talk and
