Caravan of Thieves (23 page)

This was all bad. If CID allowed the knowledge that I was a Marine in Afghan clothing to leak, the sellers would kill me, or Nawaz and Abed would. If CID did not know I was a Marine, then I was just an Afghan trying to steal rifles from the U.S. and they could shoot me. I realized that I preferred CID did not know my real identity. I believed more in their desire to obey the rules than in their ability to keep a secret; if I surrendered, there was a good chance they would rather arrest me than kill me. It’s how they thought.

Jenkins reviewed the timing and location with great precision, trying in his bureaucratic way to reassure me. I pretended he had succeeded, shook his hand, and told him to pull over, and I hopped out of the jeep. I should have just disappeared right then.

S
ome knockers on Mrs. Colonel, huh? C’mon, admit it, you’d love to get hold of them. We all would. He had to get her out of the military. It was just a matter of time before a senior officer claimed her, and McColl realized he was too ambitious to fight for her.” Blondie filled his mouth with eggs as he spoke. We sat in the dining room, having a last meal before heading out to not find the money. Unlike that moment on the base in Jalalabad, I was exhilarated at the prospect of taking this mission to the next level. If help had come, I would have ignored it.

“She’s not my type,” I said.

“Like you’d turnidown,” said Toothless, mushing it all together.

“Too expensive.”

“Said the man with twenty-five million dollars,” said Blondie. The shooter from Camp Pendleton came in with his partner, the tall guy. Their names were Stallworth and Pitt. They grunted their greetings and helped themselves to the food.

“Money’s useless if you don’t know what to do with it,” I said. “That’s why you guys are the right men for this job.”

“Whaddya mean?” Toothless put down his fork and tilted his head like a little kid.

“If you were going to steal some of the money, you’d only take a little bit. That wouldn’t make you any more honest or loyal than someone who took it all. It’s just that twenty-five million is too much for you.” It’s very hard for someone with no imagination to imagine what that means. For Toothless, it meant I was talking about a dark place at the edge of the earth. He didn’t want to go there.

“Whamakesyou think I’mstealing anything?”

“Everyone thinks of it. You have to. Just like what Blondie said about the colonel’s woman. I didn’t say you were going to steal. Only that you had thought of it. And when you did, you wondered, why not take a little bit? And you did that because you can’t think about what you would do if you had it all.”

I knew his next line: “I cantoo.”

“He’d get a solid gold tooth,” said Blondie.

“Shut up.”

Pitt said, “Twenty-five million lasts a long time when all you like is fifty-dollar whores and Budweiser.”

I asked, “What would you do with it?”

“Yeah, after yagave m’whores twennydollars for seconds,” said Toothless. He opened his mouth and showed off his gap to mark his wit. Blondie was staring at me. He wanted his turn.

“Whores and booze. None of us wants the money because it scares us. No one thinking he could open a bar on the beach in Australia? Stake himself to NASCAR? Stallworth could buy his own chopper and start a search-and-rescue company.”

“I’m not gonna be needing a job anytime soon,” Stallworth said. He also deserved to have no teeth.

I looked at Blondie. “What would you do with the money?”

“Money runs out,” he said. “You have to get something that keeps the money flowing.”

“Bonds?”

“Fear and respect. With twenty-five million, you’re a general, you give the orders. I’d do as I pleased and use the money to make people put up with it. Then it would be easy to always get more.” He looked around the table from face to face to let each of us know that he was ready to start, money or not, handing out the fear and demanding the respect.

“So Blondie is the only one of us interested in taking all the money for himself?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe we’ll all be working for him.”

“He’s alreadygotall the knives hewants,” said Toothless. The others chuckled to duck away from Blondie’s anger. The cook with the white hair came in and started clearing plates.

“I only brought it up because I haven’t counted the money or even seen it so I don’t know how much there is to start,” I said.

Blondie got up. He came behind me and leaned close with both hands on my shoulders. He said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “I hope there’s no money.” We all knew what he meant. As he started to leave, McColl came in.

“The equipment has arrived. On board in fifteen.” I downed the rest of my coffee and got up with the rest of the boys. The equipment amounted to hard hats with LED lights attached, ropes, and APRS walkie-talkies, which I hoped wouldn’t work too well underground. We were going spelunking in southern Arizona to find the money.

We took two AH-1 Cobra helicopters. Why we needed attack helicopters remained a mystery. Jessica flew one bird, and I rode with Pitt, Toothless, and Stallworth in the other. I could tell because of the way they were quiet and avoided looking at each other that they were thinking about the money. Our bird flew ahead and circled the spot a few times to check for an ambush. The coordinates took us east of Tucson and south of I-10. Pitt hovered over the spot while we all tried to see something meaningful on the ground, but there was no big pile of money and no cave entrance. After circling for a while, Pitt found a flat spit of land between a steep corrugated incline that led to a plateau and gentler-looking, sloping hills on our right.

Dan’s hideout was on a boat; mine was in a cave. I was ten years old when Johnny Tully, the brother of one of Dan’s girlfriends, asked me if I wanted to come along for a ride to find buried treasure. He was just out of juvie home, where he had come across a map, “a genuine treasure map.” The treasure, in that case, being fifty kilos of Colombian marijuana. I never knew what he was hopped up on. He could barely sit still in the driver’s seat. The map was my domain. Of course, it was a complete fake. There was no buried dope, but I found a cave and crawled in with a flashlight. Johnny was too scared to follow me, and after all the hiking he was soaked in sweat and his eyes were even scarier than when we started out: an American eagle who blinked a lot. I waited until he stopped yelling at me to come out because I had the wrong cave. I could peek out and see him turning the map around in his shaking hands. It wasn’t long before he crumpled the map and sank to the ground and lay there shivering, so I crawled out and gave him some
water. It was almost dark when he woke up, but we found our way back to the truck, and he managed to drive home after a quick stop at McDonald’s. Dan and his girlfriend made a big fuss about me and acted as if they had actually noticed I was gone. They damned Johnny and took away his truck for a week, even though I swore we had been at the movies and stayed to see a couple of different pictures without paying extra. Johnny got sent to prison almost as soon as he turned eighteen, armed robbery and assault, and I never heard of him getting out. I kept the map.

The cave became my refuge. After my first deployment in Afghanistan, and after Officer Candidate School, I began prepping the cave whenever I had leave. When Gladden gave me a hard time about going to Arizona, I was at the cave, preparing a place to hide out if I decided to go permanently AWOL. I never thought I’d be leading anyone here, but it was the spot that would give me the greatest advantage.

The cave had two entrances that I knew of. I led the group around, missing the smaller entrance a few times to increase their eagerness and impatience. The naked sun bothered McColl. “Are we getting close?”

“I think so.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“They don’t make Geiger counters for money, Colonel,” I said. Then, to soften it, “It’s just been a really long time since I was here.”

The entrance required us to crawl in one at a time. McColl and Jessica, who would be waiting outside, would have no good spot to rest there while they waited for us. They would guard it like a mouse hole.

GPS doesn’t work in caves, but it was not clear that McColl
understood that. He held on to his little tracker as if it were going to save him. Toothless squeezed inside first. I fed him the ropes and extra lamps, then followed him. Blondie, Pitt, and Stallworth came inside next. I warned them all again that I had not been there since I was a little kid so I didn’t know my way around too well.

We were in a narrow, rocky corridor about ten yards long. Pitt, Stallworth, and Toothless toted the ropes.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

“You go first. Slowly,” said Blondie. I crawled forward until the ceiling rose and soon after that the walls widened and we faced a huge room with a soaring ceiling and a floor of sharp-edged boulders sloping downward. We stopped, shined our flashes all around. Blondie gave me the signal to head forward. I moved my light from side to side, making sure to aim toward the walls every so often. The roof had no stalactites in here, just boulders that looked like they might fall out at any moment.

We reached a spot where the floor sloped away more sharply. The lights would not shine far enough for us to see anything. It felt like the edge of the world. I looked back at Blondie for instructions. “I think there’s a shaft ahead. There might be a way around it. I’m not sure. Want me to check it out?”

“Slowly.”

I edged forward, bracing myself and shining my light back and forth. I slipped, on purpose, but quickly caught myself and moved along. Ahead, I could see pale stalactites hanging like giant shark teeth. The rocks ended in a cliff edge and I peered down carefully and shined the light. The drop was only about thirty feet to a flat surface about twenty feet wide and then a pool of dark water: a beach with no sun. I signaled the others to come forward. We all
shined our lights to suss out the task. The water seemed to flow off to a passage on the right. Blondie yelled, “There! Go back!” He shined his light on a spot against the left wall that I had just passed over. Five lights swept back and forth and settled on a dusty backpack tucked in a nook in the side wall. Right where I had left it two days before.

We pounded in our pitons and rigged our ropes. Blondie sent Toothless down first, then Pitt, then me. We stood around the backpack as if it were a magic lantern. Blondie reached out for it, testing the weight with a skeptical look. He found a hundred thousand dollars inside. I watched the others while he counted it.

“What the hell is this?”

“Knowing my father, I’d say it’s there so I’ll know to keep looking. Or maybe he spent the rest. I don’t know.”

Blondie put the walkie-talkie to his mouth and spoke: “Found a pack with one hundred thousand in it. Come in.…” But he received only static. He tried again. He reattached the walkie-talkie to his belt and shined his light around. “Which way now?”

Three choices presented themselves. To the left, a flat passage with a low ceiling, showing stalagmites and stalactites. To the right of that was a similar passage which, I knew, joined up with the first passage about three hundred yards along. After that, access ended in a sheer cliff. Off to the far right, the stream stretched through beautiful, twisting caverns. I had planted backpacks in all three directions, and weapons, too. I did not care how Blondie divided us up as long as he divided us up. “It could mean go this way. It could be a way of saying the money is not here.”

“How could it be that?”

“My father would be prepared for the possibility that I didn’t come down here alone.”

The others were shining their lights around, hoping to spot another pack of money from where we stood. Blondie studied the walls. The moving lights made the surfaces flare and fade, sucking them into shadows, then spitting them out. “Okay, you two head down this way.” He pointed at Toothless and me. “You two take the passage next to us,” he said to Stallworth and Pitt. “I’ll follow the water. It’s fourteen twelve now. Meet back here in ninety minutes. And bring along anything you find.” He smiled, but his eyes were mean and dark and they settled on me.

The blackness was complete, vacuuming up our lights and swallowing them so it felt as if we were not really moving forward. We caught snatches of what the cave looked like, strobed moments, none of the big illuminated glories of
National Geographic
. I stayed yards away from Toothless and slightly in front to let him keep an eye on me. It took him a while to notice the next backpack. He jerked his light away from the pack and took a few more steps while he decided how to get rid of me. I turned to him. “You okay?”

“Creepy in here. Are yasureya know the wayback?”

“Follow the left wall. When it curves right, stay with it. You’ll see the water.” I shined the light along the left wall, then over to him. He moved farther from the backpack. “Sort of odd, isn’t it? All that money just sitting in here, waiting to be picked up? It might have gone undiscovered. What a waste. I still can’t understand why my father didn’t just spend it.”