Betrayal

Anyway, we pass the ID check-everybody knows Nolan-and they

walk us into this tiny internal room-no windows out to the hall, even. Stucco is still all over the floors from when the building was bombed in April. No drywall either. After Saddam left town, the looters came in and took everything, and I mean everything. Rebar out of the walls. Internal wiring. You wouldn't believe it. There's not a desk in the whole ministry building-everybody uses folding tables like you get at Wal-Mart. I wouldn't be surprised if we bought ' em from Wal-Mart and had 'em shipped over.

Anyway, so we're in this small, dim, dirty room. Four lightbulbs. It's roughly a hundred and fifty degrees in there. And there's these two guys who take Nolan's papers, check 'em over, then disappear into what looks like a warehouse behind them. Ten minutes later, they're back with a shopping cart full of packages of hundred-dollar bills.

I'm standing there thinking, They're kidding me, right? But they count out these forty wrapped bags of fifty thousand dollars each and-you won't believe this-Nolan signs off on the amount and together, counting them a second time, we load 'em all up into his backpack!

Picture this. Nolan's got two million American dollars in cash in a backpack he's wearing, and we're walking out through this mob of not very friendly people in the lobby of the Republican Palace, and then we're back outside the Green Zone, strolling through the impoverished Baghdad streets that are crawling with citizens who make less than a hundred dollars a month and who really don't like us. Was I a little nervous? Is this guy out of his mind, or what? And I got the sense he was loving it.

Long story short, a couple of blocks along through this really really crowded marketplace and finally we hooked back up with my guys in the convoy and made it out of town and back to the base here, where Jack Allstrong has supposedly got a huge safe-flown in from America, of course-bolted into the cement foundation under his office.