Nickel and Dime

By Doug Ball

IN DIME’S WORDS
We set out to serve our country and were danged good at it. We retired with our pittance of a check coming in each month. That check wouldn’t even pay for our gas to go fishing. Me and Nickel rented ourselves out like a couple of military town young women of the night, only the servicing was with guns and experience. The nickel and dime jobs put us in a position to walk away with millions, and we did. We went fishing. BUT, we ran into even more money in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport when we signed on to rescue the daughter of a lonely old man, a million dollars were on the line.
I, Andrew Dime, and my partner, Noah Nickel, - the man with all the brains – set out to do a simple rescue, no daughter, no pay. Things got interesting fast. First, she headed out of the country. Second, we had problems. Third, she was the problem. Then, he was the problem. Then they were the problem. Then the Government got in. Then it got exciting, and loud.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doug Ball
• Release date: Jul 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005310516

Doug Ball

Born in California and raised in Arizona. Grew to love the west at a young age while growing up in a blue collar home. Never knew we were kinda poor until I was 21 and making more money than my dad. Dad and mom were still raising three of my siblings. It was a shocker. I joined the navy after high school to get out of school and promptly went to over 2 years of technical schools. Rode submarines for 20 years and retired. Went back to school and earned a D. Min. while I pastored a couple of small town churches full of great people. My big dream in life was to be a cowboy and own a ranch. Santa never brought me a horse. At 37 I bought a horse and a ranch and lived my dream. I started writing at 39 and sold a few pieces to Mother Earth News, Countryside, and Arizona Magazine, along with many others. Wrote my first book and quit mailing out that western after 47 rejections. Nobody ever read it. That western is BLOOD ON THE ZUNI which has all five star reviews to date. Got the itch and kept writing. I recommend GENTLE REBELLION. It is the story of the life I wished I could live for years. I wrote it in my head on many a mid-watch at sea. PS. Sea horses are no fun to ride.

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NICKEL

AND

DIME

BY

DOUG BALL

Books

By

DOUG

Copyright 2021 – Douglas H. Ball

Cover designs by author

Any resemblance of the people, except references to historical persons, presented in this work of fiction are works of fiction and do not resemble any persons living or dead, they are purely the imaginings of the author’s mind.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Dedicated to

Men and women looking for adventure.

And, of course

my beloved co-author, editor, censor, critic, and wife,

Patti

Without her my writings would be

UNREADABLE.

Well, maybe not that bad.

Welcome

To

Nickel and Dime

Call me Dime. I ain’t really that valuable, but it’s my name. I stole this intro from one of the fishiest books I ever read, MOBY DICK by Herman something or other. I ain’t a big reader, but I found a paperback of Moby in a cell I was placed in after being captured on a battlefield in Africa. I can’t tell you about the battlefield, or I’d have to kill ya but it was there and so was I and so was Noah Nickel. Matter of fact, he saved my life a couple of times and it was him that got me out of that cell. But, it was before I finished MOBY, so I don’t know the ending. I figure the whale won the battle, or at least that is the way I would have written it.

Nickel is off playing right now.

I don’t get to do much of that because I don’t have no legs from the knees down. Oh, there’s those artificial stubs or the springs, but I like my wheelchair most of the time. The doctors that worked on me after the second incident, called me the 6 billion dollar man. The only thing that is missing, is the camera eye. The eye I have left is an original.

Enough about me.

Noah Nickel is the luckiest man I ever met. We have fought in wars for almost 30 years, and all the time, together. He has a Purple Heart from a scratch on his leg from a boobytrap that I tripped. I lost my first leg that day. I have 4 Purple Hearts. One for a leg. One for a finger on my left hand. One for the eye I don’t have. One for a scratch on my butt, concertina wire. Even when I was in the fix-it shop, that is the hospital, Nickel was out fighting somewhere. As soon as the docs let me go, I was at his side.

First it was the Marines, USA of course. SEMPER FI. Where we worked together very well. The second was after Noah resigned as a Gunny. He really didn’t resign, he retired when that hitch ran out.

He should have been a Sergeant Major over the whole shebang, but the shavetail lieutenant that they sent us in Col… (can’t say that one) South America by invitation, thought it was okay to tell the Gunny off in front of the men. The Gunny thought differently. That night the Gunny, Nickel, bruised his knuckles on the kid’s chin in private. The Lt. Colonel was compassionate, he sent the lieutenant home. Nickel didn’t get all the stripes he had worked for. He didn’t give a hoot really, anyhow.

Two years later Nickel retired. We went looking for work. All we knew was war and I would have to say we were very well trained and experienced and good at war. You can say whatever you want after you hear our story.

We lived on cheap security jobs keeping the world’s tyrants alive, selling and setting up security systems in castles and such, and then there was the occasional jaunt into some war between two pubahs that ran around in their bath robe all the time.

About ten years later came the doozie.

We were soldiers-of-fortune, experts at war, mercenaries paid for by some wannabe grandest pubah. At this point we were hunkered down on some sand dune in a country filled with sand dunes and wannabe pubahs, with mortar rounds digging holes all around us. The body bag carrying our target was off to our right downwind a bit. I kinda asked the mortar gods to jar their aim and tried to be one of them sand worms Nickel told me about from a book he had read. Anyway, we were hiding the best we could. A mortar round hit off to our right just far enough away from the body bag to keep it from being destroyed and revealed a rock wall.

Check that out, Nickel said.

I did. Took me a couple of minutes to dig down and find a metal door. I dug the sand away as fast as I could. Frantic story told short, I got the door opened outward, enough for us to slide down the sand into a room.

It was a room filled with goodies. The body bag was worth money, so it got pulled in as we went in. We both got out our lights and were just beginning to check it out when a round hit just outside and shut the door. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t open it. We sat down and had a grit free lunch by lite-rod illumination. It would have been romantic, but Nickel wasn’t pretty enough.

The incoming quit. We heard nothing, except the jibber jabber of the sand dune dwellers all around us. We gave it three hours and then went looking for a way out. The door was jammed by the weight of the sand on the outside. Nickel went to the left along the wall, I went right. We met in the middle of the back wall. No other doors were found. The leaky body bag was zipped up tight, but the stench of him after 20 hours in the heat made him just a mite wiffy, to say the least.

Dime, I think we might as well find out what’s in all these boxes and bags. That lid looks like a great place to start. He pointed at the box right next to the one I was sitting on..

I reached over and tried to lift the lid. It didn’t move.

I got up and wrapped all my fingers around the two opposite edges of the lid and pulled with all I had, half expecting to land on my butt with the lid on top of me. Nothing moved. I tried again.

It moved slightly. I can dead lift a few hundred pounds without a problem, but this thing was a bit heavier.

Nickel, I need some help here.

You wimp. It’s just a cover on a box.

You wanna arm wrestle this wimp again. Remember what happened last time. I had pulled his arm out the socket.

No. I don’t want to hurt you.

B.S. This thing is super heavy.

We both wrapped our fingers around opposite edges and on the count of three, we lifted. It moved but hung up on something.

We tried again.

The lid came up like a slug in a cold day. Finally, we dropped it on the sandy floor.

That thing must have been made out of lead. Got to be at least three, four hundred pounds or better. I’m tired. Your turn, Scrawny. I reached back and pulled my knife, gave the lid a heavy scratch, and the whole scratch gleamed gold. The box and lid were made out of GOLD! The gold was covered with dirt and something else.

Dang.

"What’s that coating it’s got?

Looks like old tar.

I scraped a gob of it and sniffed. Tar it is.

We were gonna die young and rich, at least that’s what I figured right then. No way out of this trap was found after our third time around the walls and checking the ceiling. I was on my hands and knees checking the floor, when Nickel with all his wisdom announced, Now all we gotta do is get out of here alive and we will be alive rich.

That was definitely the need. I said, No duh, Sherlock. We got a couple quarts of water and two MRE’s each, how long is it gonna take us to dig our way out. A few hundred pounds of gold won’t buy our way out of here. And, the dead don’t enjoy being rich very much.

Til we get out or die. I’m for getting out. Try the door again.

I pushed. Just a hair of movement, but no light around it. A tiny bit of sand trickled down the door jam. I stood back. Watch your ears. and sent a round at the door. It made it through, but I couldn’t hear Nickel standing with his hands over his ears, obviously yelling at me and shaking his head. Even his great, loud drill sergeant voice couldn’t cut through.

I said, I can’t hear you.

He busted out laughing while he shook his head.

I sat down and tried to figure out the door. I could shoot through it, but that hurt my head too much. I picked up my knife from alongside the box we had opened and scratched the door. Shiny metal, it was shiny metal. Not gold, but shiny like tin. I thought, Oh, goody. A shiny metal door.

Nickel walked up and grabbed my knife, stuck it in the hole, reached down, grabbed a pot on the floor, which turned out to be gold, and drove my knife through the door. He wiggled the knife in the hole to widen it. Dark out there, he said as he peeped through the hole as sand came trickling through.

The knife hung in the door with only the grip showing. He grabbed the grip, pulled the knife out a bit, and hit it downward which really dinged that gold pot. The knife cut down a good four or five inches. He hit it again. The gash was extended. We took turns damaging pots for over an hour. We had sand sliding though the cuts and piling inside the door getting in the way. Another pot was used to scoop the sand away as it sifted through the gap we were making, which was more work than beating up the knife.

Again, to make the story short, it took us at least a dozen hours to cut and dig our way out of there, which included the time we had to shovel sand with a golden pot to get to the door. Remember the door opened outward. It was as dark as the armpit of a gorilla at midnight. (yes, I have seen the armpit of a gorilla at midnight. The gorilla was dead in a jungle far away.)

Now we were in another predicament. Half a liter of water each, 25 miles at least to the nearest safe place and maybe a friend, and one MRE each left.

We sat on the sand lookin’ at the sky and couldn’t see nothin’. I triggered my beacon. It took a couple hours, but finally off to the west, was a faint bloom of a light. WAY off to the west. If the moon had been shining, we wouldn’t have been able to see it.

Okay, Dime. Here’s what we are going to do. Get out your GPS and get a location to this place. He got his out and we sat there on the sand waiting for them to stabilize. Each was accurate to 2 meters. I wrote down our location in my note pad. Nickel did the same.

Let’s dump all but two mags, water, and everything that is unnecessary, and load our packs with some of these dinged up pots and other trinkets. We’ll eat the MRE’s and get outta here.

I thought that was a good idea, so I did it.

The light bloom was still there but looked a bit brighter.

By the time we got our rucksacks loaded with gold, two mags, and an MRE, the light was getting closer. Dime, go break a stick light and toss it as far from here as you can. I’ll fill the hole and bury the rest of the treasure.

That was the first time I heard the word treasure from his mouth.

It was kinda funny to see how easy it was to fill the hole compared to making the hole.

Nickel’s poncho blocked the doorway we had just finished covering.

Finally, we heard a chopper. Our chopper? Yet to be seen.

The lights on the chopper went out, which usually meant they were setting up a run to kill something. The sound of the chopper was coming straight for us, so we were that something.

I followed directions. Tossed the light stick (the color of the day was yellow) as far as I could into a more level spot on the far side of the dune where the sand was flat and our door wouldn’t be uncovered by the chopper blast. By the time I got done, Nickel was just finishing the coverup. The whop whop whop of a chopper could be heard loud and clear. The chopper turned toward the light stick. As the chopper lined up on the light stick landing zone, we saw the right insignia on its side and refrained from filling it full of lead.

I could barely lift my pack into the chopper and out at the other end.

Nobody touched our rucks at any time. Nobody asked about the heaviness we showed when we moved them. The gold was sold for money at a Dubai bank, known for its reliability.

After the short time in Dubai for a bit of rest, we went out again. After which, Nickel had somehow finagled us a free ride back where we had been before. This time it was just he and me, and a dog. The reason we were sent back was, 1. We left a body on the spot that no one could find, and 2. Nickel was greedy. There was a bounty for that body, a large bounty. One warlord less would not be missed.

The body was a well-known goober-ultra-guru-pubah that liked to torture and kill little boys and girls. The reason we’d been there the last time was to take him down, but things just fell apart, as you saw, and we had to get away, quick, as you have already heard.

The pilot was a good friend of Nickel, a passing acquaintance to me, and knew something was fishy about this whole thing. BUT, he had to stay with the bird while we went looking for the door.

The dog started getting excited right where our GPS locked on and began the digging for us.

Twenty minutes of digging went by before I slid down the sand into the room. The very ripe body bag came out, which we stuck into another bag. The bag was loaded into the chopper. I told the pilot to hang on, the dog had to take a crap and wouldn’t do it with a stranger watching. The nut believed me. Nickel brought up a good ton of gold and other trinkets. We loaded them in the chopper. The pilot got nosey when we told him about the extra load, so he got a gold chunk that must have weighed a hundred pounds.

He shut up as he sat in his seat with the weight on his lap. After all, at that day’s prices in Dubai he had somethin’ like ten million dollars in his lap.

When we had all we wanted to carry that