So far. Investigations were still continuing, and there was always the chance that prosecutors might unearth some new angle to nail him, though as yet they hadn’t come up with anything particularly promising.
One item that had come up during the probing indicated that Quentin had been complicit and possibly instrumental in arranging through party or parties unknown the murder of Colonel Sterling. The information was based on hearsay evidence of a confidential informant, and was too thin and tenuous to justify the expenditure of time, money, and manpower, so it was never followed up.
One of the federal agents who was privy to this lead was an army veteran, a former military policeman who maintained contact with former colleagues who were still on active duty, including a high-ranking officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. The G-man passed the information along to his buddy.
In due course, it came to the attention of an army special investigating unit whose specialty lay in investigating such matters. Due to national security concerns, its name was unknown to all but a few. Suffice it to say that the SIU had considerable resources behind it, including sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and communications interception capabilities.
They started digging, unhindered by an excess of red tape or concern for the legal niceties. The lead was authenticated and verified. Durwood Quentin III had indeed contracted for Colonel Sterling’s death. This was proved to a moral certainty.
Due to issues of due process, jurisdiction, and some of the extralegal means used to acquire said proof, irrefutable though it was, it could never be admitted into a court of law. Quentin was guilty of an army officer’s murder and legally untouchable.
Which is where Steve Ireland came in.
Few if any nations will openly admit to using assassination as an instrument of policy. Most if not all of them use it; they just don’t care to admit it, because to do so lifts the curtain a little too much on how the world really works.
The United States government has publicly proclaimed a prohibition against state-sanctioned assassination of foreign political leaders. Since the terror attacks of 9/11, that position has become somewhat equivocal in theory; in practice, no official in any governmental agency or clandestine service wants to sign their name to documents initiating such a project. That doesn’t mean that the deed isn’t done; it just means that nobody wants to leave a paper trail signing off on it.
The military’s job is to make war. That capability is the core of deterrence and national security. The individual service member must, if necessary, be ready, willing, and able to kill the enemy. Whether that function is carried out in bloody hand-to-hand combat or by the push of a button to launch a missile, is unimportant. What matters is the intent.
Assassination is warfare by other means. That is why the Dog Team was born.
In the shadowy half-world of clandestine (“black”) operations, the Dog Team is one of the blackest of all black ops. Knowledge of its existence is classified Above Top Secret and restricted to a select few. Theirs is an awesome responsibility, one not given or taken lightly.
The Dog Team is the U.S. Army’s assassination arm, its killer elite. Its members are authorized to “neutralize,” that is, kill, persons whose elimination is deemed vital to the national security. This includes enemies both foreign and domestic.
Terrorists, spies, and traitors are not the only foes. Sometimes, the threat comes in strange and unfamiliar guises. Many and oddly assorted are those who seek to make covert war on the republic. Sinister political cabals, corporate cartels, and organized criminal elements conspire, singly or in combination, in a ceaseless effort to suborn the Constitution and seize supreme power by any means necessary.
They may be beyond the reach of the law—but not of the Dog Team.
Brinker Defense Systems had cheated the Pentagon out of many millions of dollars. This in itself was not unusual. The multibillion-dollar defense budget has long been viewed by many unscrupulous plotters as a cash cow to be milked by hook or crook. That’s a given, just part of the way the system works. If every public-and private-sector chiseler who defrauded the U.S. taxpayer was marked for liquidation, the slaughter would be prodigious.
By setting in motion the murder of Colonel Millard Sterling, an honorable officer who was doing his duty, Brinker prexy Durwood Quentin III had crossed a threshold and entered the Dog Team’s gunsights.
Team member Steve Ireland had drawn the sanction. Now somebody else was trying to horn in on the game.
Who?
Less than an hour earlier, Quentin’s Cadillac had rolled into The Booby Hatch’s parking lot. The Crown Victoria that had been following it continued southbound to the next intersection and turned left into a side street.
A few cars behind, Steve Ireland’s sedan cruised through the cross street and kept on going. Glancing left, he saw the Crown Vic’s red taillights come winking on as it braked to a halt in the middle of the side street. In his rearview mirror, he saw the vehicle make an illegal K-turn back onto the main drag, so that it was pointing northbound toward the club.
At the next light, Steve turned right, then right again, putting him northbound on a street running parallel to the one where the club was located. He followed it for a couple of blocks, made another right, then another, emerging southbound on the boulevard a long block above The Booby Hatch.
Pulling in at the curb a couple of car lengths past the corner, he parked the car and killed the lights. Rolled up the windows and switched off the engine.
The overhead dome light was switched off so that it wouldn’t light up when the car doors were opened. Steve got out of the car and locked it. It was on the opposite side of the street from the club, a good hard stone’s throw away. The neighborhood was pretty crummy, but there wasn’t much danger of the car being broken into or stolen, not on The Booby Hatch’s Mob-protected turf.
Reaching under the left side of his utility vest, he surreptitiously adjusted the flat pistol tucked butt-out in the top of his pants against his hip so that it sat the way he liked it. On a hot night like this when everybody was wearing lightweight summer clothes, wedging the gun in his waistband was less conspicuous than wearing a shoulder rig or clip-on belt holster.
He made sure his T-shirt covered the rod. It would slow his draw, but life is trade-offs. The flap of the utility vest reached down below below his hip and added to the concealment.
He strolled along the sidewalk, toward the club. The economy might be in the toilet, but you’d never know it by the mass of parked cars crowding The Booby Hatch’s lot. The witching hour was near, tomorrow was a work day, but the joint was jumping. It just goes to show people find the money for what they really want, Steve thought.
The building throbbed with the muffled beat of electronically amplified, bass-heavy dance music that thudded like war drums in the night. Loud as it was, it couldn’t drown out the buzzing and crackling of the neon sign that spelled out the club’s name over the entrance. The lurid red glare splashed the front and sidewalk like the blaze of a burning building.
Knots of men milled around, both blue-collar working stiffs and suit-and-tie office drones. From the noise they were making and the seething restlessness of their movements, it was obvious that more than a few of them had a load on.
Steve kept on walking. Further down the block, he spotted the Crown Vic parked on the same side of the street as the club. It was empty.
Two attributes his trade demanded were sharp eyes and good night vision. He spotted a man standing on the corner of the side street where the Crown Vic had made a K-turn. The man stood in a patch of gloom, but the street lamps were so bright that there wasn’t much shadow to be found.
A big guy, with short dark hair and a mustache. The guy from the Crown Vic. He was talking to a woman. Steve couldn’t make out too much detail, but from what he could see of her figure and