had only seven men now.
* * *
• • •
Hulett rode in the backseat in silence for nearly thirty minutes before the BMW turned onto al Saada Street. This was downtown Dubai; luxury cars whizzed by as he and his luxury car turned into the Roda al Morooj, a five-star hotel.
Hades knew he wouldn’t be overnighting here; it was just a convenient place for his employer to meet with him. He’d been here before, and he’d found the place stuffy and pretentious, but Hulett knew he was just a grunt working for a paycheck, so he figured the guy who signed the paycheck could meet him wherever he damn well pleased.
He was escorted directly past security in the lobby by a pair of well-dressed guards, caught a few looks from tourists who regarded his Hawaiian shirt, beard, bedhead, and flip-flops with more amusement than disdain, and soon he was in an express elevator, followed in by two additional security men. They traveled to the eighth floor, then walked together down a carpeted hallway to a set of hand-carved and gold-embossed double doors.
Hades had forgone the security protocols at the entrance to the hotel, but here at the front door of the suite he lifted his arms, and a new pair of men in suits frisked him from his ankles to the top of his head. One of the men pulled a penlight out of the breast pocket of his coat and shined it in Hulett’s face. “Open,” the man said, and Hulett opened his mouth.
The security man searched his mouth and throat for weapons; what kind, specifically, Hulett had no idea, but upon finding nothing but a few fillings, the Middle Eastern man allowed the American to pass.
Keith Hulett recognized the suite from his last visit to meet with his contact in the Signals Intelligence Agency.
He knew the man only as Tarik, which was a first name, and probably made-up. “Tarik” meant “conqueror” in Arabic, and Hulett only knew this because when he fought in Iraq, a corrupt police chief in some backwater shit hole outside Karbala had told him this, shortly before the man’s corruption led to his death by the hands of a local businessman he’d been shaking down.
Hulett was by no means fluent in Arabic, but he’d picked up his fair share in his four deployments in Iraq, his three in Afghanistan, and then fighting for a paycheck in Yemen for Tarik.
Yemen had been fulfilling work for Hades and his team. They got the job done, no matter the mission, and of this they were proud. Their tactics and procedures would have put them in Fort Leavenworth if they were still in the U.S. military, so to Hulett’s way of thinking, he had the best of both worlds. Flexible rules of engagement kept him and his men safer and the enemy deader, in a mission fully supported by the U.S. government.
A coalition of nine nations fought in Yemen, mostly through proxies and mercenaries, against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. But while the United States was part of the coalition, and while they helped and supported the Emirates, the men in Hades’s small team were not working for the USA.
The Middle Eastern monarchy hired these Americans to eliminate its enemies, but the CIA knew about it and didn’t push back, and this gave Hulett more than enough justification to cash his check every month.
It was militarized contract killing, and Keith Hulett had been doing it for a year and a half under the cloak of authority of the UAE, an American ally and partner.
And although he did his job for money, he was technically not a mercenary, because the Emirates had given him an officer’s rank. He found this mildly amusing; he’d never been an O. He’d spent thirteen years in U.S. special forces, worked his way up to master sergeant, but had been given the dreaded OTH, or other than honorable discharge, after members of his A-team accused him of killing an unarmed man in the Sangin Valley and then planting a walkie-talkie on the body to make him appear to be an enemy conspirator.
He was tossed from the military for that, but it didn’t hurt him much in his subsequent private work. Hulett made over three hundred grand a year now, and he’d told himself there was nothing he wouldn’t do if he was paid to do it.
All the men under him in his merc unit had had their own run-ins with the military judicial system and then fallen