Expendable Assets

By Drew Howell

In Afghanistan, a diplomatic protection mission goes horribly wrong, catapulting an aspiring politician to the heights of power and leaving a skilled intelligence operative under federal indictment.

Years later, veteran police officer Bobby Ryan stumbles across a strange list linking ten jobs to ten cities and within hours he is dead.

Are the two somehow connected?

As FBI counterterrorism specialist Sam Calvert pieces together the clues, the special agent realizes that the investigation's prime suspect may be the only one who can stop a deadly new attack in time.

The question is: Will a man betrayed by his own government still serve those who seek to destroy him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Drew Howell
• Release date: Jun 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458047229

Drew Howell

After graduating Annapolis, Howell served in the United States Navy for more than two decades, deploying to every numbered fleet and operating with more than sixty nations. On leaving active duty, he endured law school and entered private practice. Howell engaged in complex federal court litigation and intellectual property law before joining Blackwater as a senior vice president and its general counsel. Then things got interesting.

Book preview

Prologue

Being dead is hard. Not the laying around mouldering kind of dead—that doesn’t take a rocket surgeon. The walking around inside another person kind of dead, though, that is something most people just don’t have in ‘em.

When you are the walking around kind of dead, someone is out there looking for the old you. Most likely it is a someone who wants to either put the old you in handcuffs or put a bullet in the back of your head. Maybe both.

So when you want a new identity and a new life, the first order of business is a good death. For the run-of-the-mill insurance cheat, embezzling bookkeeper, or murder witness, a staged accident in a large body of water works well. Someplace where a corpse might sink or be washed away.

But when the someone who wants your hide is most of your own government, you need more than just a swollen river and some bad dinner theater acting. You need a cackle bladder.

In a big con, there is usually that moment when the grifters have relieved the mark of his or her fortune and they are ready to disappear into a sunset of martinis and palm trees. The swindlers stage a crisis, someone gets shot—normally by the mark—and one of the hustlers falls to the ground spurting blood. The mark panics and bolts, never to be heard from again.

After the mark has fled, the dead con artist sits up, peels back clothing from the bladder that held the blood, and has a good laugh with his or her mates. In the big game, that pouch full of chicken blood is known as a cackle bladder. So is a truly masterful fake death.

In real life, when you want to disappear from the kind of people who never give up, simply having your cousin Louie claim he saw you drown swimming down at the shore won’t cut it. You need a world class cackle bladder.

The requirements are simple. It has to be violent. It has to be just what the dearly departed deserved. You need a lot of trusty eyewitnesses. You need to leave behind an extremely battered corpse.

Oh, and preferably the corpse is not your own.

But the death itself is just the beginning. The second order of business, so to speak, is walking around dead. And that’s where most people trip up.

Life on the run—whether you’re actually traveling the globe or simply living underground—requires careful planning and constant vigilance. It’s not easy to simply step out of your old life and check into another.

There is more than just remembering a new name. It is taking on a lifetime of constant deception and duplicity. You have to walk away from family and friends, forget everything in your past, and never look back again.

To succeed, you have to erase who you were. No more contact with anyone from your old life, spouses, parents, friends, co-workers, none of them. You have to go to an entirely new place, and have documents, resources and history enough to arrange somewhere to live, connect utilities, get medical care, maybe register a car. You have to build a whole new you.

Everything has to change, your profession, your hobbies, your sports, your habits—everything that was the old you must fall away.

And that is why most people simply don’t have it in them. Sure, they may manage a few months alone in the mountains of Idaho or locked in an endless parade of cheap motel rooms, but sooner or later they can’t stand the newness and the isolation.

They begin to crave ordinary human contact. They get caught up in a friendly conversation with that guy at the bar, the woman in the checkout line, or the likeable neighbor next door. They forget about living the role of their new persona and start thinking, "How am I supposed to live my life? How do I date? How do I not tell people about what I do, what I like, and what I plan?" They loosen up and fall back into who they were.

That’s how most attempts to vanish end. Spotted by a neighbor during a quick drive past the old house, just for old times’ sake. The wrong comment on a social networking site. An e-mail that never should have been sent.

All that a talented hunter needs is one whiff—a place the fugitive has recently been, an online group with whom they interact, one careless e-mail, one traceable purchase.

Because the hunters have all the time in the world. They can make a thousand mistakes. You only get one.

Part One

1. The Noodle Incident

2. Riding Venus

3. Fobbits

4. Mouthbreathers

5. Eight Mile

6. Proposition

7. Road to Kabul

8. Dogwelder

9. Dukakis Moment

10. Scariana

11. Kashmir’yan

12. Sforzando

13. Tire Necklaces

14. Prisoner’s Dilemma

15. Sheeple

16. Point of Attack

Chapter I

The Noodle Incident

Three Years Ago

Afghanistan

Forward Operating Base LONGHORN

The man sat in a scrap of shade, leaning back against one of the gravel-filled wire mesh boxes making up the barrier wall around the compound. He was staring off to the east, toward the nearby Kyber Pass and the so-called Silk Road, the ragged path winding all the way to, eventually, China. Lot of history here. Between that, the craggy mountains, the crushing altitude, and the rough tribesmen, it was hard not to feel like a stranger in a strange land. Mars had to be less hostile than this place.

He wondered which would arrive first, the daily mortar barrage or the helicopter that was his ride out.

Three weeks ago, it would have been one of the company’s armored patrol vehicles, running thirty bone-jarring miles over roads that made most goat paths look like the autobahn.

After a while, though, it gets difficult to call it an ambush when it is a given fact that you’ll come under bomb attack and heavy gunfire on every single run. The waiting attackers are more like the neighborhood welcome wagon, only bearing rocket-propelled grenades instead of fruitcake in their gift basket.

But one thing about these private security guys—they were pretty quick to figure out when a tactic was broken. So now instead of fighting their way through in an armored vehicle, it was a helo ride. Up and out of danger in a couple of hair-raising moments, and straight into the giant air base at Bagram.

Then rotating out of country for thirty days of R&R. At least, for the other guys leaving his detail it was rest and relaxation—heading home to reunite with a wife or girlfriend or, for the spendthrift bachelors, some flight attendant in Mallorca or Cannes.

He, however, would be stuck in some cut-rate hotel in Northern Virginia, gathering three months worth of his weekly spot reports into a full-blown after action report and then being thoroughly grilled by ROADHOUSE. Woohoo.

Not that the Deputy Director used that callsign much these days. He rarely made it more than twenty miles from the Beltway—a marked change from most of his twenty-odd years of field work. Eastern Europe when that still meant something, later counter-terror work from North Africa to Central Asia, all capped by a defining role in the Northern Alliance rout of the Taliban.

Nowadays though, he was supposed to be known more as Mr. Harlan H. than as Roadhouse.

The agency had this practice of identifying its people by a first name and initial, at least to outsiders. It was less shopworn than the movie cliché of everyone pretending to be Agent Smith, but good luck trying to track down someone you knew only as Ms. Jane D. or Mr. Bob W. if they left you holding the bag.

It ran both ways, though. The rangy man leaning back against the compound wall was known only as Matt J. to most of the people he worked with. Or by his callsign, like many ops guys.

Of course, Roadhouse was a slightly different story. He was virtual legend in the division, so it seemed like half the spooks and specops guys in D.C. knew that Roadhouse was Harlan H., and Harlan H. was Harlan S. Houston.

A fifth-generation Texan, rumor had it that S. was for Sam—as in the colorful General of the Texas Army, President of the Republic, and Governor and Senator of the great state. Not to mention Harlan’s great-great-grandfather. Whether that was true or not, at six feet two, with a Stetson on his mostly bald head and a Cuban Montecristo in hand whenever he could get away with it, the old spy looked like the bastard love child of Boss Hogg and Arnold Schwarzenegger and sounded like he just came in from branding calves and mucking out stalls.

Houston was not the first ever to realize that a touch of cowpoke persona and a little Southern drawl means half the people you meet write you off as a low-grade moron.

Which can be quite a useful state of affairs.

In reality, the guy had a drawer full of graduate degrees and was perfecting his fluency in his sixth language.

Matt thought back to the last time he met Roadhouse, months ago. Piling off a transatlantic flight at Dulles, looking forward to some hard-earned downtime stateside, he was surprised to see a driver holding a card for him. After cautiously following the man out to the curb, he found not a car service but a blacked out limo.

Climb on in here, son. We need to have a chat, a deep voice called out in a South Texas drawl.

* * *

He was barely in the door when the limo pulled sharply away from the curb and toward the chaos of the airport toll road.

At the other end of the wide rear seat, Roadhouse lounged in the corner, gazing out the window. Across from them sat a plump little weasel of a man in an ill-fitting three-piece suit. What was left of his rusty hair was worn too long around the sides of his head. Philip Hagee’s background was in collection management. That is, he’d spent a decade in various cubicles and offices guiding the gathering of intel and overseeing its distribution. Now, he occupied a desk in the agency’s Congressional Affairs Office.

The three rode in silence for a few moments until Houston abruptly broke off from his reverie.

I was looking through your file. That’s an interesting callsign you’ve got there, he said.

It’s . . . it’s kind of an inside joke about a little something that happened in my first unit. It just sort of stuck.

The Deputy Director nearly sprayed his drink across the car as he tried to keep from laughing. A ‘little something?’ I’ve talked to the chief from that platoon, mister. It took some serious threats, but he finally told me about The Noodle Incident. Calling that a ‘little something’ is about like calling the Grand Canyon a fair size gully.

The younger man wasn’t quite sure what to say. He waited on the big Texan to continue.

I’ve been reading some of the material your team recovered, Houston continued. Interesting stuff.

Yes, sir. The guys did well.

"You did well. And the whole team deserves a longer break."

You know how it is—we’re glad to get what we can.

Yeah, I remember how it is. Or was.

The big man sighed. He picked at the suit fabric over his knee, seeming distracted.

Hagee coughed or cleared his throat—hard to tell which. Matt, he began, apparently uncomfortable with the whole callsign thing, do you like …

Houston flashed a glance that way, cutting Hagee off. He continued, apparently from some script, Despite that, though, you like workin’ for the agency?

Yeah! I mean, Yes. I get frustrated with the entrenched bureaucracy like everyone else, but we’re doing amazing stuff. Important stuff. I love it. His real opinion about the waste and red tape, the politics and the games, and the conniving and cowardice had been building for a while and was just a tad more strong—but a smart man knows when to shut up and listen.

So I hear, so I hear. You’re one of our best. Houston looked directly into the younger man’s eyes. Actually, that’s part of the reason I want you to quit.

Excuse me?

I want you to quit. You know, resign. Stop working for us.

Again, he did not know what to say.

Or, more accurately, stop working for them. You would still work for me. I need someone with your energy and talent.

Sir, I am not following you at all.

Matt, I want you to have a falling out with your boss. I want you to be overheard railing about incompetent paper-pushers. I want you to trashmouth me and anyone who works with me.

Okay.

You’ll start drinking too much, won’t wash enough, maybe even show up late for a movement or two. Then you will resign—before any action can be taken against you—and start looking for work elsewhere.

And why, exactly, am I going to destroy my service reputation and trash my career?

The three men braced slightly as the heavy car swayed around a ramp onto the Capitol Beltway.

Hagee chimed in, We want you on with one of the private security companies.

Wait, I must not have heard you correctly—you want me to go right back to the field, but as a contractor? Uh, that doesn’t make much sense.

Houston said, Oh, I think it may. How much do you know about our logistics in Afghanistan, Matt?

I know a little. The whole country is, to be kind about it, pre-industrial. So unless the supplies you want are rocks, drugs, or goats, they have to be shipped in. And I mean everything—food, clean water, construction materials, medicine, fuel, vehicles, tools, parts, equipment, ammo, even toilet paper.

Go on.

The place doesn’t have one seaport and or even a single rail line, so everything is either flown in to Bagram or hauled over the mountains from ports in Pakistan. Once in country, it still has to be trucked to a couple hundred camps, airfields, and forward operating bases.

Very good. And who drives these trucks?

Sir, it seems like you know this pretty well already.

Bear with me, Matt.

The military doesn’t begin to have the trucks or the guys to move that volume of stuff, so local truckers haul it everywhere, thousands of runs a year.

And who protects all these runs?

I don’t know. Private security guys, I guess.

Indeed. But they’re local companies, because the Afghanis require it and because expats can’t compete at the rates they charge. How often do you think these local security teams are attacked?

Ah, you’ve got me there. Pretty often, I’d guess.

You might think that, but actually not often at all. You see, the trucking companies each pay tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords, politicians, strongmen, commanders, police, and militia. They in turn make payments to insurgents to coordinate safe passage of the convoys. Don’t pay, you will be attacked. Pay, you will have safe passage—in fact, the Taliban will often send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents attack.

You’re kidding.

Unfortunately, I am not. This racket is worth several hundred million dollars a year to the Talis—almost as much as they’re making off the drug trade.

Obviously a problem, but isn’t military intel all over this? The vast majority of stuff being moved belongs to Defense.

Actually, they have effectively no visibility into what happens to the trucks between the time they roll out the gates at one secure facility and pull into the gates of another. Nobody is watching this.

That is where you come in, said Hagee.

I’m sorry, why are you here again? asked Matt.

Phil here is involved because you might say this one is a special interest item on the Hill. Their idea, actually, and not too shabby. We map out this network, build a few sources, and we’ll have an open window into which warlords and politicians are making moves, what groups they work with, how strong they are, who can be turned, who should be snatched, who needs eliminating—this is real opportunity.

Okay, but why not have one of our own ops officers work this?

We think a security contractor will have a better shot. Local security will relax a little and talk more freely with another gun guy than with some government official. Fellow workers slaving for a living under the jackboot of authority; the brotherhood of arms; that kind of thing.

But why not just use that as a cover? Why does it need to be someone from outside?

Look around you, son. Two-thirds of our branch is ‘from outside’ as you put it. Abraxas, Booz Allen, Lockheed, Raytheon—you can’t swing a dead possum down in the cafeteria without hittin’ eight or ten of ‘em. It’s the same overseas.

That doesn’t answer the question.

Well … said Hagee.

We have a leak. Houston said.

"… we may have a leak."

In the last four months, we’ve had three major operations blown. Nearly lost a couple good officers, and we did lose a dozen sources. Some of those ops had been ongoing for over a year, but were blown within weeks of being briefed to our own damn intelligence committees. You do the math.

Hagee looked pained. That does not mean that the information was improperly disclosed by someone associated with the committees. It could be coincidence, perhaps it was disclosed by another recipient of the data, maybe the officers in the field were sloppy—there’s no way to know for sure.

Another glare from Houston, who turned back to Matt, If word on the street is that you are a washed-up burnout, nobody is going to look twice at you. Nobody knows you are working for us, nobody can sell you out. That’s why you would be reporting directly to me. Only the three of us will know the truth.

And the two Committee Chairs, Hagee added.

Yes, Phil, and them.

Sir, with all respect, why would anyone but you—and Hagee here, since it’s too late with him—need to know?

It’s their project, son. You aren’t getting just how far up our tailpipe they are on this one. This way it’s all on you, no leak is going to blow the op. Either you fail big on your own, or you get some inside sources and you come home the hero. Meantime, we’ve got a full press on back here to find the leak and, who knows, maybe you’ll even uncover some info on that front as part of your work.

Outside the windows, the headquarters entrance came into view. A guard waved the car through the gates and across the retractable steel plates in the roadway

What if I said that I’d rather stay with my current team?

It’s your call. If you decline, you finish this rotation, and in a couple months, you’ll be assigned back here.

That doesn’t sound like my choice. That sounds like punishment. I was hoping to do something else. Doesn’t have to be more gun-toting action-guy stuff—what if I went back to an embassy posting, or maybe a trade mission or an inspection team?

Look, it’s your turn for a break; that’s just how rotations work, son. It’s time to ride a desk for a while. Whether you do this other thing is really up to you. You wouldn’t be the first to pass, you wouldn’t be the first to accept.

Wait, you have other guys who washed out but are still working for you?

"The division is not that big, Matt. There are what, about a thousand field operatives total? How many names and faces of other ops officers do you know? Sometimes we need to do things and don’t need the whole agency to know it was us what did the doing, so to speak.

When we brought you in, you were sheep-dipped so that nobody outside could tell you had any ties to us. You don’t think I can double-dip you now so that no one inside knows you’re still with us?

The Deputy Director looked out the window as the big car rolled to a stop. Phil, you can get to your office from here, I believe.

The staff officer crabbed toward the door. Wait, isn’t he coming too?

Not just yet. There’s another matter I wanted to mention to our young friend here.

Hagee hesitated, obviously deciding whether to argue the point. In a huff, he heaved himself out through the door.

Harlan watched him walk off for a moment and then turned in the seat again.

Last week, DEA uncovered a massive Tali drug site in Kandahar. World’s largest drug bust they’re calling it. There were so many tons of hashish buried out there that we had to call in an airstrike to destroy it. Nabbed three muj at the scene, but they’d already burned most anything of intel use to us.

Muj, sir? I thought we weren’t supposed to call the mujahideen that anymore? the younger man said with a smile.

Senator, I have no recollection of that, the Director grinned. Anyway, one of the items we did recover was a piece of a photograph. We were able to match it with one of our photos. Specifically, one that was part of a brief provided to …

… to one of the Congressional committees.

Houston grinned. Nicely done. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in fact.

None too hard to figure, said Matt, given that you just about threw Hagee out of the car before letting this slip. Not that I am complaining, mind you. He is their creature.

Yes. Well, the bad news is that the scrap we recovered was from a second- or third-generation copy and was not in good enough shape for us to read the identification code embedded by the printer that made the original the image.

So you don’t know which Member received that page, said Matt.

"Right. But trust me, if one of them is leaking, we will find out who. Those committees have been having our butt for breakfast on a regular basis. There are self-righteous stuffed shirts in both chambers who think we ought to be shut down, if not all thrown in prison, and they search for every opportunity to embarrass or attack.

"Hell, we all know they’ve got an obligation to do real oversight. But every time the politicos, the activists, the media, and the wackjob bloggers go into a feeding frenzy, what we get instead is an inquisition, with those jokers looking to burn somebody at the stake, innocent or no.

I just need—my boss’s boss needs—to be sure we’re not caught with our boots off on this. To be frank, we’re tired of walking out of hearings lookin’ like something the dogs dragged up under the porch.

So, what, you think I’m going to find info on the leak by investigating this logistics thing?

Nah, that is just an excuse to get you into the private security gig. Whatever info you get on the logistics security is nice to have, but what I really want you doing is collecting on every Congressional Delegation that comes through.

"You what?"

Waiters, doormen, security, drivers—they’re all invisible drones to the high and mighty. If you’re on the protective details for every CODEL that visits, you can look for someone showing the signs: making a drop, slipping off for a meet, talking too long to the wrong people, whatever. You also report back every word that comes out of their mouths during the visit. It’s not the only project we have on this leak issue, but it could prove a vital one.

Roadhouse, I mean, sir, I stay far away from political garbage as possible, but even I know that if a single one of them finds out we’re doing this, they’ll close ranks and burn us to the ground.

That’s why I want a go-to guy for the job. It is a zero-error thing. If you’re not that guy …

"My mom used that tactic on me when I was five and it didn’t work then either. Look, I get that we’d technically be clear of Church territory—spying on U.S. citizens and all that—because it’s overseas, but where is all this going? You plan on putting a Member of Congress in prison?"

"Nah. Never happen. It would turn into a giant circus, in the end they’d walk, and we’d have some massive task force investigating how we let this all happen. No, instead we find the leak and we have a little chat with them. Once we plug the leak, everything stays quiet, maybe we even pass some disinformation, the Distinguished Gentleperson gets to keep their power, and we have ourselves a little leverage on our new fairy godmother on the House Committee."

Wow. I hate this town.

Yeah, it’s ugly. But that’s life in the big leagues, kid.

Ugh. And when I’m not spying on our own Congress?

You’d be working the logistics project and expanding your legend—drink a lot, ask around for drugs, steroids, guns, whatever, work your way close to the local security companies as possible.

That probably sounds good from Committee bunkers buried in the Capitol Visitor Center, but out here in the real world, in daylight, it doesn’t work that way. You and I both know if I’m doing that stuff I’ll be off protective details before sundown.

"Look, I know it’s a fine line. I realize they won’t put up with any nonsense, because it is nothing but a headache for them. But you can read what’s in the paper. Half the world eats up the myths and rumors because they want to. It’s sexy. Money, guns, drugs, sex, blood, adventure—people want to believe it because those are exciting stories. All you have to do is create appearances and rumors. You stay clean, but look dirty. Even undercover cops are supposed to be able to do that. Long as you don’t push it too far, the security company won’t have any reason to can you, but you’ll still be a far better in with the local guns than some hotshot that everyone in the province knows is the local agency rep."

Do I get time to think about it?

Not too long. We need to move now. Houston looked toward the door and Matt realized the meeting was over.

Clambering out of the limo, he heard Roadhouse once more: By the way, about that Noodle Incident—did you really end up going in front of the commanding officer of the base?

I did, he answered with a grin.

What’d you get?

"I didn’t get anything. I had to pay five hundred bucks and spend a week restricted to quarters."

The Deputy Director laughed, How did you keep all of this out of your military record?

The base C.O. had to punish somebody and I had to keep a clean service jacket, so we reached a mutual understanding. Seems neither one of us really wanted my alibi to come out.

Wait—you weren’t there during the brawl?

I may or may not have been with the admiral’s daughter at the time, sir.

Indeed! Well, think about our little discussion, and let me know your decision. I may or may not really need your help as soon as possible.

So began the path that led Matt to be leaning against the Longhorn wall.

* * *

The soft whump-whump of an approaching helo, followed almost immediately by the unfortunately familiar buzz of incoming fire put a sharp end to the reverie. As the guard tower behind him opened up on the attackers, he grabbed his gear and raced for the comm bunker.

Plowing through the door, Matt crashed into a virtual crowd—the big hulking guy manning the radio, a short, wiry one who was supposed to catch the helo out with him, and a couple more who had decided this was a mighty fine time to stop tossing their Frisbee around out in the open. The hulk dropped his handset and yelled, Helo on deck in thirty seconds—get ready to run!

They’re coming down in the middle of this? Those guys are even crazier than I thought!

Rockets instead of mortars today—must be some kind of muj special occasion.

Yeah, lucky us.

Gravel and dust sprayed through the doorway as a mortar round dropped nearby.

There they are! I thought Haj was getting’ lazy on us.

Nah, they’re humping everything in—they probably only had a couple rockets with ‘em. Now it’s back to ol’ faithful.

A mortar round hit the top of the bunker and there was the hiss of an inbound RPG. The Hulk waved at the door and yelled something no one could hear.

Hey, at least we don’t have to dodge any more rockets, the other passenger yelled, heading out to their ride.

Yeah, for a moment there, I thought we were in trouble, Matt replied, running out the door.

Chapter II

Riding Venus

Western Europe

Aboard Venus 31

Air Force C-40B en route Ramstein AB, Germany

Len Serafina had drifted off. He awoke to see a uniformed flight attendant making her way toward him.

Where are we? he asked.

Coming up on the English Channel, sir. We should be on the ground in about an hour or so.

He rubbed his eyes and sloshed the remnants of some ice cubes around his glass. He thought about having to wake his boss in another thirty minutes or so.

Hey, can I get another Jameson? In fact, a double, if you would.

Certainly, sir. That’s not a problem.

She took his glass and disappeared up the aisle.

To look at him, Serafina was a thoroughly unremarkable man. Grey-shot hair, a little too long and feathered back like some 70’s TV weatherman, baggy eyes, average height, slight paunch.

Of course, appearances can be deceiving.

After twenty years on Capitol Hill, Serafina not only knew where the bodies were buried, he knew who put ‘em there. If there was one thing he’d learned from his dad, it was to always, always have the dirt on the other guy.

It was a subject that his dad, Big Lenny Serafina, knew a little something about. He owned a steak joint in Brooklyn—lots of dark red leather, big mirrored bar that never really closed—but Len could not remember his dad ever actually working in the restaurant. At least not doing any work related to the food business.

Big Lenny fixed problems for people. Not break-your-kneecaps, wise-guy type fixing. He made phone calls. He took meetings. He did favors for people. Far as Len could tell, that was about all he did.

It wasn’t until NYU that Len heard much about machine politics. It simply wasn’t a term used where he grew up, and it certainly wasn’t a term anyone would use around Big Lenny.

At least not twice.

But although Len, or Leonardo Serafina Jr. as his degree read, had been a de facto apprentice to Big Lenny since he began hanging around the restaurant at age ten, his dad pretty much threw him out after graduation.

Told him things were changing; he should get out of the city; maybe go to Albany or even down to D.C. Find some young turk to steer, put them into all the right spots. Get some real juice; make sure his kids didn’t end up living above a restaurant, no matter how much respect their old man got in the neighborhood.

So that’s what Serafina did.

Managed a City Council campaign, then put a D.A. in office. Found out he had a real taste for this. Worked both sides of the aisle, realized the differences between them were mainly hot air. You get your guy into office, and then you do what Big Lenny did. You fix problems.

Only now the neighbors are called Constituents.

* * *

Serafina had occasionally asked about his dad’s work the way little kids will, but it wasn’t until a weekend home from NYU that he first discussed the whole problem-fixing thing on a meaningful level.

Said he’d figured out why it worked, was because of something called Hasty Generalization. His egghead prof preached that Hasty Generalization is an erroneous inductive generalization based on insufficient evidence.

In other words, bad logic. A flaw in the genetic wiring of the old melon, if you will.

It works like this, Pop. Say you’re new in town, and you’re driving down Atlantic Avenue …

Why would I do that?

Well, you’re new in town, and you don’t know your way around.

Yeah, but if I’m on Atlantic, I’m in Bedford-Sty, and even if I’m from out of town, I’d have to be a moron not to have heard what a dump that place is. Everybody knows it’s a dump, no matter how much they yammer on about yuppifying or dinks moving in or whatever the hell it is.

Dad, the point is you are driving down the road.

Yeah, but am I goin’ toward Queens, or away from Queens? ‘Cause I wouldn’t go to Queens, you know? Why would I go to Queens? It’s another friggin’ dump.

Okay, pop, let’s just, forget you’re in the city. Forget that it is even you driving. Say Al is driving on some errand for you. He’s driving through some town, some other no-name town in some other no-name state that is not a dump, OK?

Alright, so long as it’s not Jersey. I hate Jersey even worse than I hate friggin’ Queens.

It’s not Jersey. So, Al is driving through this town, and as he passes through, he sees ten people—all of them kids.

What the hell kind of a town is that?

Dad, please. So Al comes back from his errand and he says, ‘There are no adult residents in that whole town, only kids.’

That’s stupid.

Dad …

First, Al is too dumb to know what a ‘resident’ is …

Dad …

… Second, any moron can figure out that the kids gotta have parents around somewheres. Trust me, they don’t just raise themselves, and last I checked they don’t just hatch outta eggs, neither.

Dad …

Len, I’m bustin’ your chops.

What?

I mean, I know what you’re talking about. It’s blindly applying a small sample size to a whole group. Same thing that drives racism and prejudice. I might not have gone to NYU, but I ain’t stupid you know.

Uh …

You’re right, son. It helps make things go round, whether it’s here in our district, or down on Capitol Hill. Say old Mrs. Piazzi is driving over to the Bronx to see her worthless piece of crap son, although why the hell he lives over there, I’ll never know. She hits that big pothole over on Flatlands, you know the one like to swallow a truck?

Yeah, but …

Listen. It’s so bad, she bends her wheel, car’s all kind of messed up.

Okay.

"Mrs. Piazzi comes in here, what do I do? I have Al get her some panzanella, I listen to her sob story, I call the councilman, we talk about the pennant, we talk about her problem, he says he’ll have a crew out there on it first thing Monday.

"I get off the phone with him, I call Fat Eddie over at the shop, tell him Council Member Gennaro is very concerned about this and I would consider it a personal favor if he would fix her wheel on the cheap. Pothole’s filled, car’s fixed—everybody’s happy.

"Piazzi spends the next six months talking about how great the Councilman is, how great I am, even how great Fat Eddy is.

Election time, Gennaro talks about what a dump our roads are. We put Mrs. Piazzi on the stage; maybe even get her in the paper. And who do you think her and all her little old bitty friends are gonna vote for?

Gennaro.

Right.

OK, but if it was that easy, why didn’t he just fix the pothole six months ago?

Because then we wouldn’t have Mrs. Piazzi running her yap about how great we are All these dopes who hear her think that because we helped her, we oughta be re-elected, because we must be helping everyone.

Okay.

"But we aren’t, we just fixed her one little problem. If we were really worried about helping everyone, we’d have fixed the other two hundred potholes in that stretch of road, so the other five thousand schmucks who busted their cars wouldn’t be shit outta luck. All that we really did with the roads was fix one hole and talk a whole lot about fixing them someday, which maybe happens, maybe not."

And you got everybody thinking they’ve got to vote Gennaro to get the road fixed.

Exactly. See, everybody expects potholes to be fixed—you don’t win elections because the road has no potholes. You win elections because the road’s a piece of crap, but you are the man with a plan. You’ve got a vision on how to fix things with your new law, your new tax, your new program. You just use Mrs. Piazzi to show there’s a problem and to show you’re a fix-it kind of guy. You drag out one or two people who embody something—the sick kid, the crime victim, the bankrupt guy—people are hard-wired to assume it’s an epidemic. There’s your hasty generalization.

* * *

Big Lenny was right, of course. Serafina had put his dad’s wisdom to use for a councilman of his own, then the D.A., a gubernatorial and two state senate campaigns before he finally found his young turk.

Christina Van Zandt was a rising star on the Governor’s staff in nearby Maryland when Serafina convinced her to run for the state General Assembly—not that Chris needed much convincing.

As soon as it was clear they had clinched the General Assembly primary, work began on the U.S. Congressional campaign.

Conveniently, the Governor’s office was drawing up the congressional redistricting plan in Maryland. To the surprise of almost no one, the districts just North of D.C. were reworked—Gerrymander is such an ugly word—to create one of the richest, heavily divided districts in the whole country. And Van Zandt was anointed as the party’s choice.

Four elections later, she was one of the most promising up-and-comers in the party and, as Chief of Staff, Serafina was the éminence grise.

The Airman, or Sergeant, or Specialist, or whatever she was—Serafina could never keep them all straight—finally delivered a recharged glass and he watched her skirt sashay up the aisle. Junkets definitely had their perks.

In any event, if things went right, they were up for a Committee Chair next month, maybe then a move to the other chamber. After that, who knows?

Right now, though, he had to go wake the bitch up.

Chapter III

Fobbits

Afghanistan

Parwan Province

After the dramatic departure from Longhorn, the remainder of the helo flight is tame by comparison. Barren mountainsides spotted with snow fly by below, with narrow valleys worming into the granite hills. Rocky wadis and hairline trails wind everywhere through the steep hills.

Terraced fields make their way up the valley walls, and occasional mud-walled compounds or mud-hut villages flash past, crowded hard up against the greenery around mountain streams.

Life and landscape here are little changed since Alexander the Great brought his army through these valleys two thousand years ago on their way over the Kush into modern-day Pakistan and beyond.

Closing in on Bagram, the terrain opens into a broad valley. At the northern end, snow-covered mountain peaks surround the base on three sides. The eight-square mile base sits on the West side of a flat plain at an elevation near 5,000 feet.

Although the field at Bagram is about as safe a place as a gringo is apt to find in Afghanistan, it is still a war zone. The result is that air traffic—from MH-6 Little Bird helicopters all the way to gargantuan Antonov-124 cargo planes—make combat approaches to Bagram.

For fixed-wing flights, that means you come in dropping like a lawn dart. In a helo, it basically translates to the flight profile of a brick. Everyone but the pilot pretty much considers it a marginally controlled crash.

After just such an approach, they flared up and then settled neatly on the transient-aircraft ramp. A burly former Recon Marine waited nearby. With a carbine slung over a loud Hawaiian shirt and a pair of painfully ugly surfer shorts, he made an incongruous welcoming committee. Wavy blond hair and a catfish mustache didn’t help much.

Who’s that? yelled the other passenger over the engine noise.

OUTLAW Joe Younger. Took over a couple weeks ago as head of ground ops at Bagram for the security company.

Outlaw?

"Yeah. He got a jaywalking ticket up in Georgetown his first weekend out of boot camp. Thinks it’s a big joke, blows it off. Six months later, gets pulled over by some Georgia