The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 26

They got ready to move out, but before they did there was one last thing they needed to do.

They had to dress local. Everyone always dressed local when they were in the field. It was safer. It made them less noticeable as a team of foreign operators off on a mission, doing something interesting.

In Afghanistan Ellie had worn a keffiyeh and longish tunic to blend in. Here, to do the same, it looked like she would need a woolen hat and loose jeans and a thick checked-cloth shirt.

She hadn’t thought of that until now, and was a little annoyed with herself.

Ellie hadn’t thought of it, but Joe had. He seemed to have anticipated the need. He had brought a large soft-sided bag of spare clothes with him, in the back of his SUV. He showed it to Ellie, and asked if she and Sameh minded changing out of what were obviously military coveralls, and Ellie said no they didn’t mind, and she was glad he’d thought of it.

She was glad of the clothes, and it made her feel a little better about Joe, too, since he’d had the sense to remember, when she hadn’t.

She and Sameh hunted around in the bag, and each found something that fit. The bag held a mix of men’s and women’s clothes in different sizes, but mostly older clothes, which mostly smelled clean. Ellie was glad of the cleanness. It made her think this was a bag Joe carried around specifically for his clients, to make them less conspicuous, and not just his dirty laundry which he’d decided to have Ellie and Sameh wear.

They found new clothes, and changed in the darkness beside the car. The security team who had come with them from the helicopter landing base were around them, forming a perimeter.

They changed, and Joe looked around watchfully as they did. Not completely trusting the security team, Ellie thought, as well as being polite.

She decided she liked that about him too.

Ellie threw the coveralls she’d just taken off into the back of Joe’s SUV, since rolled-up they just looked like any other cloth. Then she loaded in the bags of equipment that she and Sameh’s had brought with them. She tried to cover those bags, so the new black cloth wasn’t as obvious, pulling Joe’s bag of clothes, and an old rain-jacket she saw, over the top of the newer bags.

While she was doing that, she noticed Joe had a large gun case in the back of his SUV too. Something long, probably a rifle or assault rifle of some sort. She assumed it was a rifle, and that he had other weapons as well, but she decided that to be sure, she actually ought to check.

“Are you armed?” Ellie said to him. “Do you have something on you now, I mean.”

Joe hesitated, probably still thinking about Ellie’s distrust of him. “Should I be?” he said, in the end.

“I would,” Ellie said. “In case anything happens.”

Joe looked at the gun case.

“Not that,” Ellie said. “Be discreet for now.”

Joe nodded, and opened one of the SUV’s back doors, and took a handgun in a holster out from under one of the seats. He tucked it into the side of his jeans, in beneath his jacket.

Ellie was pleased. That was discreet. In fact, everything about them was discreet now. Joe’s SUV was old and dusty, and they were all dressed like locals, too. Ellie and Sameh’s first-layer body amour wasn’t obvious under their clothes, not the thinner under-layers they were wearing at the moment, without the heavy tactical outerwear they had in their bags for actual fire-fight. They clothes were discreet, and their weapons were discreet too. Ellie and Sameh were wearing their sidearms like Joe, with their shirts untucked, and pulled out over the holsters. Their submachine guns they could keep down beneath the windows of the car, or on the back seats, with something thrown over them. A towel or an old shirt, something like that.

Ellie looked at the car, and decided they would do. She reached over, and pushed some of Sameh’s hair back inside her hat, then grinned at her.

Sameh grinned back. She was happy, excited to be setting off, and probably a bit buzzy still from a vague sense of danger, and from relief that they’d finished flying.

“All right,” Ellie said. “Are we ready?”

Joe nodded, and Sameh did too.

Ellie looked over at the local security team. “Thank you,” she said, “Give us five minutes, and then go.” They said they understood.

Ellie got in the front of the SUV, beside Joe, and Sameh sat in the back. She nodded at Joe, and he started to drive.