The Birds of Baghdad

By Michael Burke

Former US Deputy Marshal Jack Parker was tough, rough and relentless in tracking criminals. So when he felt forced to retire from the US Marshals Service he used those same skills to track down a Nazi artifact in Iraq worth millions of dollars. In his pursuit of a fast payday he sets in motion a series of events that has the CIA, Mossad, Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Army all chasing after him. He escapes from one pursuer after another and when he gives in to a desire for payback he inadvertently manipulates trigger happy governments to the brink of the next Middle East war. In a land where lying is an artform, he has to find friends and the truth to survive, and in a high stakes game where the outcome is life or death, he goes all in against the odds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Burke
• Release date: Apr 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476054773

Michael Burke

Michael Burke works in advertising and lives in Chicago.

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The Birds of Baghdad

A Novel by Michael Kevin Burke

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Published by

Michael Kevin Burke

on Smashwords

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Copyright © 2012

by Michael Kevin Burke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

In the Beginning There Was Greed

Traveling Down A River of Sand

The End and the Beginning

About the Author

In the Beginning There Was Greed

I knew it wasn’t going to be a good day when I heard the baby scream.

The Royal Jordanian airplane had not even taken off for the one hour flight from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad, Iraq and it seemed like there was tension in the airplane cabin. The usual US State Department people sat clustered up front, replacements for staff working in the Embassy in the Green Zone who finished their obligatory one year tour in the post conflict Iraq and then took the first plane home. Their replacements didn’t look happy.

‘Post conflict’ my ass. Some smucks were tossing mortars and rockets into the Green Zone every couple of days and the last time I checked a mortar was a tool of warfare. Not that it couldn’t be used in negotiations, but if that was the case you would want to let the receiving party know that you were going to blast the snot out of them just so that maybe you could extract something from them. In Baghdad everybody felt that the Iranians were behind it, but proving it was a tad difficult because there were eighty seven different groups that hated the United States, and some Iran supported and some had other patrons, but all were happily supplied with the necessary exploding ordnance by their benefactor.

So why was I sitting on the tarmac at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan with a planeload of government bureaucrats, mercenaries, contractors, spies, assassins and mothers of screaming Iraqi children? Not to put too fine of a point on it, greed comes to mind.

I was there because of a picture. A photograph that an old friend of mine, a decent chap who I met about ten years ago by happenstance on the street in Washington DC just as he was about to get mugged or worse by three young bucks who thought he was an easy target of opportunity. I was a Deputy US Marshal then and my partner and I were going back to the Justice Department to do a closeout briefing on a case we had been working on for six months. We just finished making the last batch of arrests of a nasty group of militia types in northern Virginia who didn’t possess a warm affection for the US government, which was okay with me, but when they started collecting plastic explosives to back up their loud mouths, the US Attorney for Northern Virginia took exception and called in just about every federal law enforcement agency in the DC area to track and bag these guys. Of course the bigger the case the more news coverage the US Attorney received. If you think that I am saying that sometimes a noted legal beagle who was a prosecutor would do stuff just for publicity, you would be correct. But that case was in my rearview mirror so to speak and out of my front window I saw these three guys closing in on this well dressed solitary figure on a quiet street in DC and I knew what was going to happen. My partner saw it also because he said I see it, and he stopped the car between the punks and the man. I got out real quick with my game face on but I didn’t really need it because the second the young lads laid eyes on me they decided that today was not a good hunting day and they took off about as fast as human beings are capable of moving. Their prey was startled by the commotion, and he looked a tad bewildered but he figured out what just transpired.

Good God! I was so lost in thought that I wasn’t aware of my surroundings. That’s not a good thing for a man in my profession, he said.

And what profession would that be? I asked.

I’m an archaeologist, he replied with a wry smile. I spend my life in foreign countries digging up artifacts and a lot of the places where I work are not always friendly to Americans so I am usually pretty observant. Today I just got a new commission to do some work in the Middle East and I was so caught up in my thoughts I was in my own bubble. He extended his weathered hand and said, Forgive me, my name is Hadley Duncan, I can’t thank you gentlemen enough.

Jack Parker, I replied, US Marshals Service. Where are you headed Hadley?

I was going to try and find a cab to go to Union Station.

Why don’t you let us take you, it’s on our way and that way you won’t become a statistic.

It was one of those chance encounters that change your life forever. It was just that I didn’t know it at that time. Hadley turned out to be a great guy, interesting as hell and as generous as they come. From then on every time he would come into the DC area he would call me and he would take me out to dinner at the kind of restaurants that I really enjoyed but never could afford to go to. His stories of far off lands and buried treasure—he called them artifacts; I called them treasure—all sounded pretty exciting to a guy who spent his life as a social sanitary engineer, sucking up the human scum from the streets of our fair land.

I’m not sure just how I ended up a cop. I had a football scholarship to college and I might just have made it to the pros but my coach screamed at me in practice one day to put a hit on a guy who he thought was dogging it. I knew the kid was hurt and he was afraid to tell them because he didn’t want to lose his scholarship, so I had some words with the coach and he did what coaches do all the time to football players, at least back then, and he pushed me. Now I was cool with that because that was how the game was played, but then he pushed me again, hard and I just said to myself that’s enough of that shit and I dropped him with a roundhouse left and there went my pro football career, and my attendance at that particular institution of higher learning. It would have been worth it if I saved the other kid but he ended up getting bounced from the team because of his injury and found himself back in West Virginia working in a coal mine along with the rest of his family. I learned pretty quickly that life sucks if you’re just a regular guy. And I also learned never to knock anybody out in front of witnesses, a little bit of knowledge that proved handy over the years.

I was raised in Northern Virginia near where the Battle of Bull Run took place. It was a great Ozzie and Harriet upbringing until my older brother was killed crossing the street near our house by a delivery truck that just lost its brakes. My mother took it real hard and I watched as the light slowly went out in my mother’s eyes and she just seemed to shrivel up and within five years she died. My dad was a US Postal Service worker and a Korean War vet who took it just as hard as my mom but he managed to hold it together just long enough for me to turn twenty one before his liver gave out from drinking. I signed up for the Army just to get a roof over my head until I could figure out what to do with my life. The Army stuck me in the Military Police and I turned out to be pretty good at it, particularly when they wanted a knucklehead to break up a bar fight in Germany where they first sent me. A bar fight on a payday night over there was more like a salon fight in the Old West. There were guys punching girls and girls smashing chairs over guys heads and nobody could ever remember what the hell started it. When I finished my service commitment I ended up in the US Marshals Service because it just seemed like the natural progression from where I was. I really wanted to go into the FBI but not finishing collage put the kibosh on that idea. I managed to get a college degree at night but by that time my service file at the Marshals Service had a few too many questionable memorandum in it and I didn’t waste my time applying. Besides, after working with the FBI on a couple of cases I decided that their arrogance exceeded their ability. They were redeemed in my eyes a few years later when I worked with a really impressive team and I got the urge to try to join them again but by then I knew it was like a teenage love affair that was just not going to happen.

Besides having hands that had no problem knocking out teeth, I did have another small problem with my own mouth. If I didn’t have such a smart mouth I might have made a career in Hollywood. I was big, tough, ruggedly handsome with a full head of dark hair, now showing a lot of salt, and I could charm the ladies. But I had this thing about people who bossed you around. I hated it and I hated them. As one of my supervisors once told me ‘you don’t take direction very well,’ which would have made a Hollywood career a real flame out. Instead, by the time I finished up my career as a cop all I had to show for it was a crappy pension, three ex wives and two dead dogs. And I really missed my dogs.

I always married strong women and I never cheated on my wives because a deal is a deal. When they realized that I was always going to be the first guy to volunteer for the worst assignments and they were always going to be the second person who knew about it, they all said ‘oh no, this is what you should do’. When I ignored them and did what I wanted to do anyway, they all eventually said adios. I still get along with them and they all got remarried to nice stable guys, and they all seemed to enjoy bossing their new husbands around. I haven’t given up on the ladies but I don’t have a lot of confidence in my own ability to make the right choice so I just focus on life and I leave love to chance.

This brings me back to my current situation sitting on a plane in one of those far off lands that Hadley loved, wondering if I was truly nuts. I’ve been retired from the Marshals Service for about six months. I wasn’t really ready to retire but since everybody from the Director on down to my immediate boss thought it was a good idea, I kind of went along the game plan. They weren’t really threatening me, but after an Assistant US Attorney started to make a lot of noise about the condition of the latest mope I brought in for arraignment, I knew that my time was up. This perp had spent twenty of the last twenty one years in prison and when we went to bring him in he swung at my partner and managed to break his collar bone. At that point I just made a piñata out of him, and being six foot three and two hundred and fifty pounds of pissed off cop, the fellow got his lumps. I thought it was well deserved and defensible in court but the Assistant US Attorney must have been worried about the national debt and the future medical bills that were going to be required to put this guy back together, so he had another view on the matter. I knew it was time to pack it in because if you are out on the street and angry with quick fists and a gun you’re eventually going to get jammed up big time. Hadley was quick to offer me part time work as a body guard which paid surprisingly well, shockingly well really.

Some time ago in his travels, after Saddam Hussein got his neck stretched, Hadley came across an area in Iraq that he was scouting out for possible future excavations. Iraq was one of the places where ancient civilization started and I usually don’t pay much attention when he talks about stuff that dates back to Biblical times and even pre Bible times, but I kept staring at a photograph he gave me a few days ago that brought me to my present situation.

It was a picture of a line of cars in a basement garage somewhere that was lit by bare light bulbs. Hadley told me that he had to shovel the sand away from the basement window of this place to get in and he lowered himself into this really big underground garage with two levels. It took awhile but they found a light switch and got lucky that the electricity was working because when the lights went on they saw so many cars it looked like an underground used car lot. They weren’t just Toyotas and Fords; they were Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Jaguars, Rolls and Mercedes. There was an absolute fortune in rare cars in that picture. But it was one of the photos that Hadley took that got my attention big time.

It was obvious that this basement garage held Saddam Hussein’s magnificent car collection which was rumored to be one of the greatest in the world. Hadley said that this place was secure because nobody could get near it without the knowledge of the local Sheik, and he was a nasty character, but wonder of wonders, he was a friend of Hadley’s.

There was a wisp of a rumor in the late 80’s early 90’s that Hitler’s three axel Mercedes staff car had been found in a garage in Poland near Hitler’s field headquarters at Rustenburg, the famed Wolf’s Lair. That’s all it was, just a bit of a rumor. Then a few years later came another rumor that someone in the Middle East bought it for a fantastic price. Then nothing.

I remember little details like that because I have a bit of a fascination with cars and that car is one of the most infamous cars in the world. I mean if you found