company couldn’t just stiff the Army; they had to deliver something. Operating through some accommodating defense ministers in a tiny Balkan state who served as front men for the transaction, they bought a quantity of arms and ammunition from the People’s Republic of China. The matériel, surplus equipment left over from the Korean War, was transshipped to Afghanistan and Iraq. So haphazard and slipshod was the operation, that much of the delivery was still packaged in cases bearing the PRC’s original labeling and Red Star insignia. The pistols and rifles were too rusty and antiquated to ever actually hit a target; that is, assuming that the cartridges could even be made to fire.
Brinker might have gotten away with it at that, considering that their high-level civilian friends and co-confederates in the Pentagon were equally minded to sweep the mess under the rug and make it go away.
They hadn’t reckoned on the tenacity and single-minded devotion to duty of one Colonel Millard Sterling. Sterling was career Army and posted to the same procurement department in the Pentagon that had brokered the Brinker arms deal. He might have looked more like an accountant than a warrior, but in his way he was a strike trooper straight down the line.
The contract had been granted despite his opposition, thanks to the influence wielded by political appointees, and he was determined to expose the whole rotten mess. He couldn’t be bluffed, bought, or scared. Pressure came down from above, giving him the time-honored bureaucratic screw job, relegating him to the Pentagon’s version of Siberia and career limbo. Sterling stubbornly kept at it, building a file of relevant documents and affadavits, collecting a damning paper trail that led straight back to the malefactors. He kept going through channels, filing reports, bombarding the higher-ups with the naked facts. Worse, some officials were starting to take him seriously.
That’s when Colonel Millard Sterling was found dead in the garage of his modest home in a Virginia suburb, his head virtually blown off by a blast from a shotgun clutched in his hands.
Suicide, his detractors said. It proved he’d been delusional from the start, causing him to construct a paranoid fantasy about alleged irregularities in the Brinker arms deal and, ultimately, take his own life. His grieving family swore he’d never owned a shotgun, but that was sloughed off as the understandable blindness of relatives unable to come to grips with the fact of their loved one’s self-destruction.
The Brinker affair seemed to have died stillborn, only to be revived some months later when a long-term congressman and high-level member of the House Armed Services Committee involved with military procurement was arrested by the FBI in connection with an unrelated bribery investigation.
Under intensive grilling and with the threat of a lengthy prison term, the representative spilled his guts, unloading his inside account of a massive criminal conspiracy between defense contractors, legislators, and federal officials to defraud the United States government.
Among those implicated were members of the Brinker board of directors. The company went bust and some of its officers went to jail, but not Quentin Durwood III. Having learned his lessons since his brokerage house days, he’d been careful not to leave his tracks on the dirty dealings that had gone down during his tenure as Brinker’s CEO. His accomplices who’d been nabbed pointed the finger at him, but the uncorroborated testimony of convicted felons was inadmissable as evidence.
He looked guilty, was guilty, but the government couldn’t prove it in court, so he walked away from the Brinker scandal and collapse free and clear.
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
