"A buck an hour? Is that what they're making?"

"Give or take, for the cooks and staff. Guards maybe two hundred a month." Nolan lowered his voice even further, gestured toward the desk. "But don't let Tucker hear that. Jack bid it out at around twenty an hour per man, but as I say, Kuvan's a genius. His fee is two bucks an hour, which takes our cost up to three an hour, so we're hauling in seventeen. That's per hour, twenty-four seven, times a hundred and sixty guys so far, with another two hundred in the pipeline. And the more we bring on, the more we make. Like I told you, you play it right, this place is a gold mine. How much they paying you, Evan, two grand a month?"

"Close. Plus hazard duty…"

Nolan cut him off with a laugh. "Hazard duty, what's that, a hundred fifty a month? That's what our cooks make."

"Yeah, you mentioned that." The news disturbed Evan-a hundred and fifty dollars extra per month and he faced death every day.

After a little pause, Nolan looked at him sideways. "You know what I'm making?"

"No idea."

"You want to know?"

A nod. "Sure."

"Twenty thousand a month. That's tax-free, by the way. Of course, I've got lots of experience and there's a premium on guys like me. But still, guys like you can finish up here, then turn around and come back a month later with any of us contractors, and you're looking at ten grand minimum a month. A six-month tour and you're back home, loaded. This thing lasts long enough, the smart-money bet by the way, and I go home a millionaire."

UP AT THE DESK, Major Charles Tucker looked like he could use some time in the sun. He'd sweated through his shirt. He sported rimless glasses, had a high forehead, and nearly invisible blond eyebrows-a caricature of the harried accountant. And he made no secret of his disdain for Nolan. "Let's see your paperwork. Who signed off on it this time?"

"Colonel Ramsdale, sir. Air-base Security Services Coordinator."

"Another one of Mr. Allstrong's friends?"

"A comrade-in-arms. Yes, sir. They were in Desert Storm together."

"I'm happy for them." Tucker looked down at the sheets of paper Nolan had handed him. He flipped the first page, studied the second, went back to the first.

"Everything in order, sir?" Nolan asked with an ironic obsequiousness.

"This is a lot of money to take away in cash, Nolan." He gestured to Evan. "Who's this guy?"

"Convoy support, sir. Protection back to the base."

Tucker went back to the papers. "Okay, I can see the payroll, but what's this sixty-thousand-dollar add-on for"-he squinted down at the paper-"does this say dogs?"

"Yes, sir. Bomb-sniffing dogs, which we need to feed and build kennels for, along with their trainers and handlers."

"And Ramsdale approved this?"

"Apparently so, sir." Nolan leaned down and pretended to be looking for Ramsdale's signature. Evan stifled a smile. Nolan, punctiliously polite, somehow managed to put a bit of the needle into every exchange.

"I'm going to have somebody in audit verify this."

Nolan shrugged. "Of course, sir."

"Sixty thousand dollars for a bunch of dogs!"

"Bomb-sniffing dogs, sir." Nolan remained mild. "And the infrastructure associated with them."

But apparently there was nothing Tucker could do about it. Nolan had his form in order and it was signed by one of the Army's sanctioned pay-masters. He scribbled something on the bottom of the form. Then he looked up. Behind Nolan, the line had grown again to four or five other customers. "Specie?" Tucker said.

"I beg your pardon," Nolan replied.

"Don't fuck with me, Nolan. Dollars or dinars?"

"I think dollars."

"Yes. I thought you would think that. You're paying your people in dollars?"

"That's all they'll take, sir. The old dinar's a little shaky right now."

Tucker made another note, tore off his duplicate copy, and put it in his top right-hand drawer. "This is going to audit," he repeated, then looked around Nolan and said, "Next!"

THAT NIGHT IN HIS TRAILER'S OFFICE, Jack Allstrong sipped scotch with Ron Nolan while they tossed a plastic-wrapped bundle of five hundred hundred-dollar bills-fifty thousand dollars-back and forth, playing catch. Allstrong's office, nice at it was, remained a sore point with him. This was because the main office of his chief competitor, Custer Battles ("CB"), was in one of the newly reburbished terminals. When Mike Battles had first gotten here two months before, he found that he'd inherited several empty shells of airport terminal buildings, littered with glass, concrete, rebar, garbage, and human waste. He had cleaned the place up, carpeted the floors, wallpapered (all of his supplies bought and shipped from the United States), put showers in the bathrooms, and hooked the place up to a wireless Internet connection.

At about the same time, Jack Allstrong had had to start work on his trailer park to house his guards and cooks, although he still couldn't compete with such CB amenities as a swimming pool and a rec room with a pool table. Allstrong knew that these types of cosmetics would be important to help convince his clients that he was serious and committed to the long-term success of the mission, but he was initially hampered by lack of infrastructure and simple good help.

But then that genius Kuvan Krekar had come up with the idea of dog kennels as another income source, and that was already working. Allstrong now had a decent number of the ministry people starting to believe that IED-and bomb-sniffing dogs would be an essential part of the rebuilding process in bases all over the country.

So all in all, Jack was in high spirits for a variety of reasons: Kuvan was in fact interested in going in with them on their currency-exchange bid, which gave it immediate credibility and might make them the front runners over CB; the CPA was still paying them in dollars (which meant Allstrong could buy his own dinars to pay his local workers at the deeply discounted black-market exchange rate); the bomb-sniffing-dog revenue wasn't going to be stopped, at least in the short term, by bureaucrats like Charlie Tucker.

The bottom line was that the two million dollars in cash that Nolan had retrieved today and carried here in his backpack covered approximately four hundred thousand dollars in the company's actual current expenses, including tips to Colonel Ramsdale and several other middlemen. Everyone was too busy and/or too afraid and the times were too chaotic for anyone to bother keeping close tabs on exactly what the money was used for, or exactly where it went. There was plenty of it, in cash, and the mandate was to get Iraq up and running again. Subtext: whatever it cost.

For example, in the first month of the contract, Allstrong's trailer park had run out of drinking water within a week, a true crisis. Jack had gone to Ramsdale and told him he desperately needed to buy more water immediately, but that he was out of money, what with payroll, housing costs, legitimate security equipment, weapons, and vehicles such as armored Mercedes-Benz sedans, and all other daily supplies for his now close to 150-man staff. Without a personal look at the situation and apparently without a qualm, Ramsdale signed off on an authorization for Allstrong to add six hundred thousand dollars to the original sixteen-million-dollar contract over its six-month life-peanuts considering the fact that the contract as written already was paying Allstrong a little bit more than eighty-eight thousand dollars a day, all of it in cash.

Allstrong had requested a total of a hundred thousand dollars from Ramsdale for the water, but the colonel had been so used to thinking in one-month units that he'd okayed six times the requested price, and Allstrong had seen no reason to correct him. And after all, the truth was that they were all working in an extremely hostile environment, where the danger of death was real and omnipresent. In Allstrong's view, that risk should not go without significant reward, even if much of it turned out to be under the table. It wasn't as though people like Ramsdale didn't know what was happening. In fact, Ramsdale was planning to retire from the active military before the year was out, and he'd already made a commitment to stay on in Iraq as one of Allstrong's senior security analysts at a salary of $240,000 per year.