Carthago Delenda Est

"Jack, you don't really have to kill Dante..." She said, holding him tightly once more, putting her head on his shoulder and feeling the strong, rhythmic beat of the arteries in his neck against her cheek. "I mean, I'm safe here with you, and I can stay here longer, he'll eventually forget about me."

She felt him softly kiss her head and gently pat her back. "Sweetheart," He began. "We can't take that risk. And you can't stay shut up in this condo forever. What will we do if you're pregnant? Will you give birth here, too?"

As she heard him mention the distinct likelihood that she was carrying his baby, Veronica smiled, lifted up her head and kissed him. While Jack's getting hurt, or arrested or killed as he tried to kill Dante was bothering her, the future she wanted as his wife and the mother of Jack's child/children, was something she thought of often. When he'd gone to work the day before, she'd lain in bed, holding his pillow tightly against her, breathing in his scent and alternating between worrying about his death and thrilling to the future she so badly wanted with him.

"Okay, I see your point. I have to be healthy...for the baby; for our baby." Veronica said, smiling and feeling her skin warm and her desire begin to build again. She looked into his jade green eyes, felt her smile broaden as he smiled back at her with the full force of his mischievous grin.

"I'll be careful, Veronica." He said, calling her by her actual name, not 'Ronnie,' or 'sweetheart.' She wasn't certain why he'd done so, but felt the seriousness of his conviction.

Veronica buried her face against his neck again, and held him very tightly. "Just come back to me, Jack." She said, feeling emotional and confused, feelings she'd felt more often and with more suddenness in the manner by which they came upon her, than she ever remembered feeling before.

XXXVI

Wednesday, 0943

Jack slowly sipped the hot, bitter coffee he'd gotten used to but still very much hated, glanced at his watch and willed Masud to move faster. Jack saw Masud look away from the old timer with whom he'd become sidetracked on his way back to Jack's table from the rude bathroom of the Russian/Tajik restaurant in which they were meeting. He once again marveled at the way that the federal funding had brought both government contracting companies (like Horizon) and the people who worked for them (Jack, and Masud, in this case) to a town that heretofore was not one anybody would associate with the kinds of overseas contract work both Jack and Masud performed. And as he'd done in the past, Jack simply dismissed it as the work of the party in charge of the Senate bringing tax dollars to their home constituencies to support the local economy.

He forced himself back to the present and away from the revolting coffee and Masud's dawdling, refocusing his mind on the energetic wake-up sex he'd had with Veronica that morning. After exercising, Jack had reluctantly left Veronica to call Masud while she had gone to the shower and then to the kitchen.

"I wonder if Gill enjoyed some morning sex today..." Jack mused and had to stifle a laugh as he imagined what kind of buggery would count as morning sex in the municipal Men's lock-up.

Just as Jack was beginning to enjoy the afterglow of remembering good sex and satisfying revenge, Masud extricated himself from his conversation and sat back down at Jack's table.

"Sorry, Jack, you know how it goes with old guys and war stories." Masud said, smiling and lighting up his fifth cigarette in 20 minutes. "So, you're sure about this? You can deliver these clubs?"

"I'm sure. You let me work, and I'll call you when they're ready for new ownership."

Masud appraised Jack through the obnoxious and choking smoke of his cheap, Tajik-made, 'Samanids' brand cigarettes. Jack had long ago come to the conclusion that everything made in the former Soviet Union was always and unnecessarily more noxious, corrosive, slutty or just gaudy than the respective Western counterparts. "You have been a good investment Jack, worthy of every penny!" Masud said, raising his steaming motor oil-like macchiato and sarcastically toasting Jack before continuing. "And, the boss likes you; you know that, right?"

"I do, Masud." Jack had recognized Masud's 'Slick-Willie' style of sophisticated and intelligent unctuousness the first time he'd met him, when Masud had been one of the "Cultural Advisors," formerly known as interpreters or just 'terps,' assigned to Jack and Jimmy's Battalion in Afghanistan. He'd always been popular for his ability to present in clear, American-English and using Western concepts, what the myriad of tribal elders, local bigwigs and Afghan National Army counterparts were trying to say as they (always) asked for more money. Masud was ethnically (mostly) Tajik, but he spoke natively in Dari, Hazaragi, Russian, and spoke fluently with an accent but at an educated level in Pashto, Urdu and English.

After Jack ran into Masud in his subsequent visits to Afghanistan when Jack worked as a private contractor, he learned Masud was heavily connected to Tajik and Uzbek warlords in Northern Afghanistan through his membership in the world of Tajik organized crime. Naturally, when Tajiks came to the US as part of the Central Asian, formerly-Soviet-diaspora, they brought their mafia, which had the benefit of already established networks with the larger and slightly-less brutal Russian mafia. And as they spoke now over bitter, Central Asian coffee, Jack knew that Masud was speaking on behalf of his immediate, US-based Thief-in-Law (aka,'вор в зако́не') leadership, rather than the Afghan-Tajik warlord-whom-they-shall-not-name, but who was the primary intermediary for the Afghan-government client of Horizon Solutions for whom Jack had worked on his last two deployments.

"So," Masud began, restating the terms Jack presented for a final discussion before agreeing (or not) to his terms, on behalf of his Tajik mafiosi. "You get rid of the shit-owner, and not the man on the license papers but the actual shot caller owner of these four clubs and the associated bail bonds service. Then we pressure the people whose names are on the business licenses, and we can take over those businesses, at no-cost to us, because, according to your homework, and really, we have verified this, the "shit" in question is not a player of any real importance."

Masud's English-speaking accent was a uniquely crappy (though intelligible) polyglot of Central Asian accents corrupted by the overarching Tajik-Russian accent of whomever had been his English teacher. The result was Masud said 'shit' with an overly Russofied pronunciation, changing the first two letters from an aspirated sibilant sound into the retroflex consonant "shh" sound of 'Ш,' itself a throwback to the Old Church Slavonic influence on both modern Russian and Tajik languages. Though Jack was unaware of the linguistic orgy going on in Masud's confused pronunciation, he nonetheless felt his left eye twitch in response to the uncanny valley effect that Masud's accent had on his ears.

"Right." Jack confirmed.

"And we get the money from the clubs, and get to use them to deal our own stuff out of, and not the stomped-on shit they sell now, yes?" Masud confirmed, pronouncing 'stomped' as an unusually Spanish-influenced "uh-stomped."

"Correct."

Masud smiled at Jack, sipped more of the hideously bitter coffee and reached over the table to pat Jack's hand, lingeringly. Jack tried to stifle the revulsion he felt from the older, hairy man's touch, and knew that Masud was both aware of Jack's reaction, and had intended to cause it. "So, then you do this, and you believe this makes us just about even, yes?" Masud said, finally taking his hand off Jack's, though not without trailing his fingers along Jack's wrist and forearm.

"Yes. I think that makes us even." Jack countered.

"Hmm," Masud mused, appearing to think about it. "No, I think not, Jack. You will do this for us, and then you will go back to Afghanistan on the contract, one more time. You do your magic some more, help us here and there; Then your debt is settled. That's the deal."

Jack sat back and let out his breath and knew Masud read the anger under the surface of his forced expression of neutrality.

"Perhaps you think we are unreasonable, Jack?" Masud asked quietly, smiling and looking at his dainty coffee mug, shaking his head sadly.

Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck slowly rise; Masud's polite countenance and jovial demeanor masked something else going on; Jack didn't want to look away from Masud but knew instinctively that someone behind and just inside his peripheral vision had a gun, likely a semi-auto pistol, trained on him. "Fuck." he thought, and instantly considered that perhaps this was his karma for similarly drawing down upon Veronica when they'd first met. When he saw Masud looking at him again, this time with the hard eyes of the cruel man he was, Jack knew he was right, and that he was on the edge of a knife blade.

"Okay. That works." Jack said, nodding his head simply. He saw Masud continue to stare at him for a few heartbeats, sipping more of the foul coffee before smiling woodenly and contemptuously as his eyes squinted in a facial expression that only the psychopaths hailing from that region of the earth, running East along the Caucuses and across the Caspian Sea, to just West and North of the Hindu Kush, display; it was an expression Jack knew meant equal parts "Go ahead and play games with me, I'm just a little ball of fluff!" and "I'll laugh at your jokes as I cut your throat and gouge out your eyes with my thumbs." He saw Masud quickly flick his gaze to someone out of Jack's sight, to his right, and almost imperceptibly shake his head once before returning to smile again at Jack, this time in a merely patronizing manner.

"It's so good to know we understand one another, Jack. I think that's a wise decision, and anyway, the light is at the end of the tunnel, yes?"

"Yes." Jack confirmed, nodding once in defeat and finishing the bitter sludge before him. He waited politely a few more moments before Masud smiled woodenly once more, waved slightly in Jack's direction, dismissing him.

Jack stood up and slowly made his way out of the market, avoided looking behind him, and kept his countenance in as contrite an expression as he could maintain in the face of the upstart terp. "Soon." He thought, knowing that cowards like Masud who treaded on the reputation of far more dangerous men, eventually found themselves in situations where their bluster would fail them.

XXXVII

Wednesday, 1158

Jack pulled into the parking lot of the 'Noodles and Company' restaurant a block from the university campus, next to Jimmy's Jeep Wrangler and turned off his engine. Jack gently brushed the small, three finger grip of the Ruger LCP he wore in his right ankle holster, reminding himself it was there, before stepping out of his car and walking into the restaurant. Jack ordered and the sat down at the booth in the Southeast corner of the restaurant where Jimmy sat waiting for his already-ordered food.

"Hey, brother." Jimmy said, shaking Jack's hand as he sat down.

"King James, thanks for dragging yourself away from work and school to meet me."

Jack saw Jimmy smile bitterly and look down at the table. "I don't have that job anymore; I told off one of the obnoxious, self-centered pricks who called last night, and my Team Lead had to fire me..."

Jack raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Damn, Jimmy; I'm sorry to hear that. You and Grace still okay?"

Jimmy exhaled and raised his hand in a 'what can you do' gesture. "Yeah, Grace was surprised and worried about me, but it's okay. It was getting to be too much with my course load and the job, anyway. Besides," He said. "it's not like either of us really need the money..."

Jack knew there was far more bubbling under the surface of Jimmy's forced-calm expression, recognized the symptoms of slowly erupting rage, but decided it was for Jimmy to choose when to deal with it, and not for Jack to try and induce it. "True. Just let me know if you want to have a beer and talk about your feelings and shit... I know this lousy strip club, not too far from here." Jack said, smiling as his joke caught Jimmy off guard, and gently segued the conversation to what Jack needed to talk with Jimmy about.

"About that," Jimmy said, taking from behind him a yellow, legal sized envelope. "Here's a printed-off google earth graphic showing where I mounted the cameras. I wrote down the coordinates on the bottom of the paper; you still know how to read MGRS?" Jimmy asked, referring to the Military Grid Reference System they'd both learned. "Thanks for the adhesive spray, by the way, I'd forgotten about that."

"Yup, I still know how to read a map; About the spray, you're welcome. Keep it if you want."

"So, what else is going on here, Jack?" Jimmy asked him, looking directly at him, but more with resignation than hostility.

Jack considered playing with Jimmy, answering but not really revealing anything, but decided against it. Jimmy was trustworthy, had already participated in a criminal conspiracy, and Jack decided that he'd actually find the rest of the story personally of interest.

"You remember that douche-bag terp, Masud?"

Jack saw Jimmy's eyes squint as he relived an unpleasant memory. "Yeah, he was the little pussy who would freak out when we took fire, but then acted like he was 'King-Shit-of-turd-island' over all the other terps back on the FOB, right?" Jimmy asked, referring to the Forward Operating Bases from which Jack and Jimmy had operated while in Afghanistan.

"Yup. He's also heavily involved with the Afghan Member of Parliament and once-and-future warlord who represents the Afghan Government's contracts with Horizon to train his ALPs." Jack said, using the acronym for 'Afghan Local Police.'

"Okay..." Jimmy said.

"So, two years ago when I go back to AFG on my first deployment as a contractor, I'm just a driver, bringing some broke-dick, tier one guys back and forth as they train these ALPs, and who do I run into but Masud. He recognizes me, talks me up to the MP/warlord, and offers me some additional work."

"'Additional work'?" Jimmy asked. "Moonlighting, Jack? How'd you not get fired?"

"Horizon was in on it; turns out, they had another contract to not just train the ALPs with STX lanes," Jack said, referring to the US military's use of 'Situational Training Exercises' conducted along a linear area (or lane) within a larger training field, "but to also conduct "live-fire training," which as it turns out really meant leading the ALPs on raids to schwack the poppy-growers who didn't cut the warlord in for a slice, or the Chechens who are always fucking things up there like recurrent herpes at the prom."

Jimmy winced at Jack's analogy, but gestured for him to go on.

"Guess who I find out is working with the ALP to rat-out and finger the overly-stingy growers?"

"Who?"

"An old-school, Soviet-era Muj, missing his left ear, who always wears a pair of faded blue, old Russian aircraft mechanic's coveralls..."

Jimmy froze and his eyes locked on Jack's. Jack smiled and nodded slowly, his nostrils flaring slightly and the veins in his temples began to rhythmically pulse.

"You found that mother fucker?" Jimmy asked, feeling his head throb painfully, as he thought, for the first time in two years, of the dirt-bag who had triggered the IED under their up-armored HMMWV and made everything in their lives go sideways.

"Found him and killed him. I knew him the minute I saw him, even though he didn't recognize me from Adam." Jack said, shaking his head and smiling as their entrées arrived, and waited for their doughy, middle aged Latina server to leave them. "He actually held out his hand for me to shake, and smiled at me. I smiled back at him, I felt pretty happy; I finally found that asshole. I smiled at him wide and felt the spall of his brains and skull fragments hit my face as instead of shaking his hand, I drew my Sig P-229 and shot him, an inch away from his face, right between his fucking eyes..."

Jimmy felt a hurricane of thoughts and feelings warring inside him as the good, law abiding inclination of his personality was slightly appalled at the casualness with which Jack had described murdering the booger-eater who'd tried to kill them both. Not just tried to kill them, but who had wiped out the other three members of their fire team. But mostly, Jimmy felt a flood of relief welling from somewhere inside his mind he hadn't realized he'd been warehousing a great deal of tension, feeling his headache throb once more, angrily, then slowly peter-out. For several minutes, Jimmy said nothing, wallowing in the echoing vacuum of nothingness where for two years he'd known only a chronic, unquenchable throbbing pain.

"Damn, Wolfman... You fucking got him." Jimmy marveled quietly, sitting back against the cushion of the booth and for the first time in many years, feeling 'normal' again.

"Yup, and it cost me. Turns out that vintage Muj, after he'd needed money to pay for some relative's kidney transplant in Dubai, took a one-off job with the Haqqanis, either directly or through the Taliban to blow us up that day. After that, he made his way back to hide with his old Soviet-era Muj friends, in particular, the warlord I was working for..."

Jimmy cocked his eyebrows in surprise as Jack continued. "Yeah, that's why we could never find the fucker after he blew up our HMMWV; the fucking warlord was hiding him; some fucking allies..."

"Damn..." Jimmy said, shaking his head in surprise at the interconnectedness of everything in war. An old Afghan holy warrior who'd fought with US-supplied weapons and funding against the Soviets in the 1980s, had taken contract work to attack a new generation of invaders, this time from the US, on behalf of well-heeled, radical holdovers from the earlier Soviet-era war, and then after hiding under the protection of Western-allied Afghan warlords, had died at Jack's hands in revenge for that contract IED work, while Jack worked for a private security company paid with Western-derived, "security and development" funds to train Afghan Local Police in the employ of the same old Soviet-era holy warrior-cum-warlord who was using these local police (and contractors like Jack) to kill his narco-rivals who were all growing opium poppies and selling them to distributors in Central Asia, who processed and then trafficked the opium illegally in the US and Western nations, sending more Western funds back to Afghanistan to fuel the same corruption and war that had been the lifeblood of conflict in Central Asia for almost 50 years...

"Yeah. Turns out the warlord was kind of fond of this old Muj, and stuck me with a tab for $2 million in wetwork to pay it off..."

"Fuck, me..." Jimmy said, sitting back in the booth and shaking his head. Neither of them showed any interest in the cooling bowls of pasta that sat in front of them.

"So. In addition to schwacking this meth-slinger who threatened to kill Ronnie, I can pay off most of the half a million I still owe the Tajiks if they take over the four clubs and bail bond business the dirtbag owns."

"Five businesses like that, together, are worth a hell of a lot more than half a million, Jack."

"I know, but that's what we agreed was their value, as it relates to my debt."

"Okay, so you do this, you pay off your debt, then what?"

"Not that easy." Jack said. "Masud made clear he, or really, the shitbirds he works for, are going to get rid of me in AFG the next time I go back on contract."

Jimmy smiled again, nodding his head and finally taking up his fork and began to eat his noodles. Jack watched him eat for a moment, knowing that Jimmy thought as he ate, and waited.