I reviewed what had brought me to this as the plane flew through the late November winds to Kentucky. I had done what I did because I had nothing better to do. Sixteen years working as a mercenary in a variety of shitty places had given me a certain sense of... normality; that was unusual.
I fell in with a Romanian outfit when I was eighteen after being a barman on a small passenger liner (Read arms dealer's mega yacht) for six months. I had proven to be inventive about how to use what could be found, I had given the Romanian ex colonel a few good ideas about sustained income rather than only working of operational income and was brought in as a senior officer in the setup from the start.
Over the years I had used my inventiveness to engineer a few platforms and systems the outfit had survived some ferociously dangerous engagements with and profited off by partnering with armaments companies who produced them now. I had a talent for languages too and had taken an intelligence and planning role because of my talents. I had learned Tagalog, Arabic, Spanish, French, Russian, and of course Romanian in addition to Zulu, Sotho, English, and Afrikaans I had spoken before becoming a mercenary.
I had studied psychology, engineering, business, organizational culture, history from a variety of perspectives, literature, and a few other subjects in short courses between or for assignments. This meant that I was very well educated but qualified for very little.
For sixteen years the default situation for me had been that somebody wanted to kill me. Some survival routines were second nature now. I watched who was watching me, I never approached a destination directly, I never moved at a constant speed, and I stayed away from crowds. I had a very strict gun control policy: if there was gun I wanted to control it. I stayed fit and if at all possible never worked myself to a level of tiredness that I lost my awareness of my surroundings.
Most of all; I never went ass first into the unknown.
So why was I parachuting into the Kentucky Appalachians on my own, in November, into unknown dangers? All that was really known was the the situation was dangerous. A few dangers were known, the guy I was trying to beat was a serial killer and a billionaire. That was bad, what was worse was that he had a small army in Kentucky, and the factory to arm them.
The worst definition in the dictionary is for the word Mercenary: Somebody who joins an armed conflict primarily for money. Somebody setting aside ethics for personal profit. Yada yada yada. No mercenary I ever dealt with did it primarily for profit. No mercenary without ethics survived long either. That definition should have been applied to Harvard MBA.
I had very good reasons to be jumping into danger now. None of them had anything to do with money. More to pass the flight time than motivate I remembered the last year. It had easily been the weirdest year in a career that included some insane events. Ironic that it was after I had retired.
I had been bored when I converted an old inter city bus into a mobile home. After promoting my ranch foreman to manager and offering a deal in which he would buy the ranch off me if he paid me twenty thousand dollars per year for seven years. He was never going to get such good deal again so he took it and I took my bus to see what I could find.
It hadn't taken me long to find trouble in Utah going to Nevada just outside Wendover. When I saw a woman trying to flag traffic down on Interstate Eighty. It had be such a cliche ambush scenario that I had stopped just to fight it out.
It had turned out to be even more fun than that. She was flagging traffic down for the very good reason that both front wheels of her Camry had burst. That had happened because she had jumped the tracks from the secondary road beside the railway then driven half a mile through the scrub to get to the shoulder of the highway.
The reason she had done that turned out to be that a guy who manufactured illegal explosives had been trying to kill her. I got the story mostly because she and I had lived and grown up on neighboring cattle farms in South Africa. My soul sang to hear it and I decided to help long before she actually asked for help.
Her grandfather had been killed when his ranch in South Dakota burned to the ground. The insurance company had determined that the farm had been burned down on purpose by finding the remains of incendiary devices. They were refusing to pay out and were on the point of charging her with murder, arson, and insurance fraud. She was naturally trying to avoid going to to prison and had been following up on a license plate that had been found on the road in going past the ranch that had been on the Silverado the guy manufacturing explosive drove.
It took me less than eight hours to get the guy with the explosives taken out of circulation by the Nevada Highway Patrol without incriminating my old neighbor. It was a day that became memorable for them in how it had allowed them to use all the emergency power the state allowed. They respected the anonymous tips from people they knew the identities of and made the national news with spectacular scenes of a Silverado being blown up to make a ton of ANFO not dangerous anymore.
It took another two weeks for the insurance company to pay out and drop any idea of charging the woman. By the time that happened I was already interested in why a ranch would need to be burned down and the woman had signed it off to me in payment for keeping her alive and out of prison with a few million in insurance money.
I took the road to South Dakota having found out that the ranch was one thousand eight hundred acres in size, had four neighbors three of which were the government in various entities, when I looked further the government owned ten of the twelve properties nearest the ranch. There were no concession businesses registered on any of them, the largest property was twelve thousand acres belonging to the National Parks Service. Surprisingly nobody was doing anything there either and I was toying with idea for a business as I considered the topography of the area. I just needed to find out why a ranch got burned down.
I was delayed a little getting to South Dakota though.
In the dark; driving to get to to Highway Sixteen before the first November snow made it hazardous, I hit a cow that had lain down on the road ten miles south west of Casper, Wyoming. That meant I was stuck getting the bus repaired. I bought a tricked out Ford Bronco from the workshop repairing my bus with an idea of keeping it to be a second transport and to help me get around in Casper. When I stopped at the truck stop near the airport I was looking for Maggie, a hooker I had hired before on a trip through. The first real blizzard of winter was about to blow in from the arctic and I was a little frustrated that Maggie had not answered her phone.
My thinking was to get a good meal and go back to the hotel to ask the night clerk about a different Mrs. Right-Price. As usual with truck stops there were a few people standing around on the apron under the eaves of the diner and convenience store and I took note of them as I turned the engine off. I discounted the people there as not being a threat, no people watching arrivals, more focused on thoughts of leaving the marginally warmer place to get to their trucks or cars to pump fuel or go home. I was thinking about lunch and whether I should arm up when I stepped onto the apron to go into the diner.
"Will you buy please mister?" A little freezing voice whimpered.
I didn't even think about it as I picked the girl up and carried her inside. The woman behind the counter wanted to chase the girl out but a look from me ended that idea. Then I turned my attention to the girl. In a pair of woefully inadequate ballet type slippers she stood five feet tall. Copper red hair, needing a cut but it was neatly combed, pale skin turning blue in the cold was now turning red in the warmth of the diner, the pain was probably incredible and the bright blue eyes were starting to tear up. Dressed in a mini dress an inch longer than an old windbreaker I was not surprised that she was in pain aside from clear embarrassment.
I opened my trench coat and pulled her into it lifting her to ride my hip easily. Her head was under my lapel hiding her face while I ordered two meals with hot chocolate for the girl and coffee for me. Taking a table at the back of the diner I sat down with the girl moving he legs from holding on around my waist to curled up on my lap.
She put her head out from under my jacket when she had recovered composure and kissed my cheek making me chuckle. She smelled nice and from what I could see of her clothes they were clean. My conclusion was that she was not a junkie and she had a code of acceptable behavior, she was just damn poor.
"Feeling better? What's your name?" I asked.
"Eileen Kearns mister. You really ordered food for me?"
"Yes. Why are you here dressed so badly?"
"Mom is trying to make the rent... we're locked out by the landlord."
"Alright. The weather did turn fast. Last night it was still quite warm. How much is rent?"
"Two thousand dollars."
"At that kind of rent the landlord would be pushing to have you turning tricks."
"Yeah, he wants me to run merchandise for him. He wants me to drive to Texas to fetch some snow. Mom wants me far away from him but to get him to lay off me is going to take more than two grand. He's mom's dealer and he once drove to Georgia to get his money from someone who didn't pay him."
I had seen this before.
