Free Rogue Forces by Dale Brown Page B

of?”
    “Las Vegas,” Patrick replied. “It’s basically a bunch of investors who acquired a few high-tech but surplus aircraft from various companies and offered their services to the Pentagon. I was offered a job after I retired.”
    “Sounds like the same deal with my company,” Kris said. “We’re a bunch of former and retired military physical, communications, and data security technicians and engineers. We still wanted to serve after getting out, so we formed the company.”
    “Like it so far?”
    “Frankly, I started the business because I thought the money would be good—all those stories of companies like Blackwater Worldwide getting these fat contracts were really attractive,” Kris admitted. “But it’s a business. The contracts may look juicy, but we spend the money getting the best personnel and equipment we canfind and offering an effective solution for the lowest price. I can tell you that I haven’t seen a penny out of the business except what it costs me to survive. If there’s a profit, it goes right back into the business, which allows us to do more services, or do a service for a lower cost.”
    “Just the opposite of the military,” Jon Masters said. “The military spends every penny of its budget so the budget doesn’t get cut the following year. Private companies save or invest every penny.”
    “So you don’t have any trouble with these other companies, do you?” Patrick asked.
    “I see some of these snake-eating ex–Special Forces guys wandering around the base,” Thompson said, “and they’re all decked out in top-of-the-line outdoor clothing, brand-new weapons, the latest gear, and tattoos up the wazoo. A lot of those guys just want to look cool, so they spend a lot of their own money on the latest and greatest. My company is mostly made up of computer geeks, ex–law enforcement officers, private investigators, and security guards. They pretty much ignore us. We get into scrapes every now and then when my guys deny them access, but we get it straightened out eventually.”
    “Doesn’t sound like a good way to go to war, Kris.”
    Thompson chuckled. “Hopefully, it’s not war,” he said. “War should be left to the professionals. I’d be just as happy supporting the professionals.”
    The base was immense and very much resembled a small Army post back in the United States. “This place doesn’t look half bad,” Jon Masters commented. “I used to be sorry for you guys being sent all the way out here, but I’ve seen worse Army posts back in the States.”
    “We never had a regular Burger King or McDonald’s, like some of the superbases,” Thompson said, “and if we did, the Iraqis probably would’ve shut it down anyway after they took over. Most of the troops here are still sleeping in CHUs because we never got around to building regular housing units. Of course there are no families here, so it’ll never compare to any regular overseas base like Germany or England. But the weather is a bit nicer and the locals are less hostile…at least a little less.”
    “CHUs?”
    “Containerized Housing Units. They’re a little bit bigger than a commercial truck trailer. We can stack them if we need the room, but as the Army draws down we have more room, so they’re all on ground level now. That’s where we’ll bunk your guys. They’re nicer than they sound, believe me—linoleum floors, fully insulated, air conditioning, Wi-Fi, flat-screen TVs. Two CHUs share a ‘wet CHU’—the latrine. Much nicer than latrine tents.”
    A few minutes later they came to a twelve-foot-tall fence composed of concrete Jersey walls and reinforced corrugated metal sheeting topped by coils of razor wire. A few feet behind this wall was another twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire, with heavily armed civilian K-9 security officers roving between the fences. Behind the chain-link fence was a fifty-foot clear area. It was all surrounding a plain boxy-looking