Michael Walsh Bundle by Michael Walsh Page A

watching us from that building, plus a lookout kid over there behind the trash pile. I know you’re carrying an old .38 that hasn’t been cleaned in a year and if you try to fire it you’ll blow your balls off. I know that the two guys in the window have machine pistols but from the way they’re handling them they probably couldn’t hit an elephant in the head if he was standing in front of them. I know your life sucks, and that you think there probably should be more to it than getting high and getting laid, but you don’t know what it is. And I know that you could use the money, so let’s just make our little transaction now and everybody stays alive.”
    â€œYou crazy.”
    â€œThat’s the chance you have to take.”
    Asshat thought for a moment. “What it gonna cost me?”
    â€œThat.” Devlin pointed to an old Chevy Malibu. “Do we have a deal?”

Chapter Fifteen
    I N THE AIR : B ARTLETT
    The Gulfstream was clean and comfortable. On the tarmac at Van Nuys Airport it looked like any of the other corporate jets that allowed the winners of life’s lottery to avoid the LAX nightmare. Whether you were flying down to Rio for a climate-change powwow, spending the weekend at your ranch in Montana, or just hopping over to Nevada for some stays-in-Vegas fun, the private jet was God’s way of telling a sizable number of people in the LA area that they were making just about the right amount of money.
    Inside, however, the jet that was ferrying Eddie Bartlett and his friends to Scott Air Force Base near Belleville, Illinois, about twenty miles east of St. Louis, was a little different than, say, the Paramount jet. For one thing, it was a state-of-the-art arsenal, with everything from nonlethal ordnance to armor-penetrating RPGs. Concussion grenades, cluster bombs. Small arms of every description, including the AA-12 automatic shotgun that Xe developed at its training grounds in Moyock, North Carolina. All hidden behind rotating panels that answered only to the team leader’s palm prints, retinal scan, and voice register.
    The jet was carrying two dozen men, each one of them identified only by a name tag. When he first came to Xe—it was called Blackwater then—the system had been to use only numbers, so as to inhibit the formation of personal relationships and the exchange of confidences. But numbers proved to be too impersonal for the unit’s own good; some cohesion was found to be necessary, and so he’d hit upon a rotating, mission-specific structure of common first names—Jim, Fred, Bob, Jose—that could easily be remembered and, later, forgotten. The name tags were worn only during mission prep and needed to be memorized; once in combat they were discarded.
    The men—there were no women—were all handpicked for their résumés and their code of silence. Except for the very odd occasion when he needed a woman for camouflage or misdirection, Eddie Bartlett worked exclusively with men. He was old school that way. No sexual jealousy, not protective empathy. Not that Eddie didn’t have plenty of the latter—as a husband and father, he was a puddle of protective empathy. But when it came to taking care of business, he was all business.
    So his team consisted of Delta, SEALs from Team 6, Green Berets, Rangers, 10th Mountaineers, Specials Operations Command personnel, some retired, some moonlighting, and some just freelancing. Officially, of course, none of them was there.
    Once, men like these really were “special ops.” The Navy ferried the Marines, the Marines landed, the Army bore the brunt of the fighting and the mopping-up, and special ops were used sparingly, for intel and dirty work. Today, in the wake of the second Iraq War, special ops were the point of the spear—the first resort, not the last—with the regular Army acting in a support capacity. There was a lot of grumbling about it, but