Slowly, carefully, Balenger set down the ashtray. He didn't want to tell them what they wanted to know, but he didn't see an alternative. Maybe this would help him bond with them. "I'm former military."
"And how come you know the professor?" Tod asked.
"I took a class from him."
"I don't get the connection."
"I was in Iraq."
"I still don't get the connection."
"The first Gulf War. Desert Storm. 1991. I was a Ranger."
"Hi, yo, Tonto," JD said.
"After I came back home to Buffalo, I got sick. Aches. Fever."
"Hey, I didn't ask for your medical history. What I want to know is-"
Vinnie pounded another hole in the wall.
"The VA hospital in Buffalo kept telling me I had a stubborn case of the flu. Then I heard that a lot of other veterans were sick, and finally the newspapers and TV started calling it Gulf War syndrome. The military said Saddam Hussein might have used chemical or biological weapons on us."
"If you don't answer the question…"
"Or maybe it was caused by a disease spread by sand fleas. The desert has a lot of insects."
"I ask you to prove you're not a cop, and I get your life story."
"But the more I read about it, the more I suspected what made me sick was the depleted uranium in our artillery shells. The uranium hardens them and makes it easy for the explosive heads to go through enemy tanks."
"Uranium?" Vinnie frowned.
"Hey, Big Ears," Tod said. "A little less listening and a little more pounding on that wall. You're too close to that candle. Move it away before you have an accident."
"The military claims depleted uranium is safe." Balenger shook his head in fierce disagreement. "But I hear it makes a Geiger counter click. We fired an awful lot of artillery shells in Desert Storm. The wind blew a lot of smoke and dust in our direction. It took years before I felt normal again. It ended my military career."
"That's when you became a cop?"
"I'm telling you, I'm not a cop. I drifted from job to job, mostly driving trucks. Then the second Iraq war happened." Balenger paused. He was getting close to his previous nightmare. Sweating, he wondered if he could make himself talk about it. No choice. I've got to, he thought. "Our military got overextended. Corporations trying to rebuild Iraq hired civilian guards for their convoys. Former special-operations personnel. The need was so great, they even accepted guys like me who'd been out of the service for a while. And the pay was fabulous. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year to make sure supply trucks didn't get ambushed."
"One hundred and twenty-five thousand?" Tod was impressed.
"A year. Then conditions deteriorated, and more convoys got hit, and the pay got even better: twenty thousand a month."
"Shit, you're rich."
"Not hardly. The companies paid by the month because not a lot of guys were willing to make themselves targets. You needed to have not much going for you at home. Bad job prospects. Nobody close to you. Like me. I mean, it was really crazy over there. Snipers and booby traps all along the road. Most guys didn't last long. Either they got killed, or they said 'To hell with this' and quit. In my case…" Balenger paused, listening to Vinnie pound with the crowbar. "I got a chance to collect only one paycheck."
"Only one? Shit, what happened?"
Finally, I've got them, Balenger thought. "I was guarding a convoy. We were attacked. An explosion knocked me unconscious." He rushed through it, not wanting to remember the pain and gunfire and screams. "The next thing I knew, I was tied to a chair in a filthy smelling room. Most of the smell came from a sack tied around my head."
Tod, Mack, and JD stared.
"And?" JD said.
"An Iraqi insurgent told me he was going to cut off my head."