“They want us to make the drop and fly straight back to Andrews. We’re not going on to Incirlik.”

Arnold had been looking forward to overnighting at the massive U.S. base in Turkey, sleeping in a bed. Now he’d have to stay in the air for another night and another round of air-to-air refueling.

His day had started fifteen hours earlier when Staff Sergeant James arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland trailed by two unmarked 18-wheelers belonging to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, each carrying half of a $2.4 billion withdrawal from a Fed warehouse in East Rutherford, New Jersey—a million square feet, the world’s largest repository of American currency, hidden in plain sight in the Jersey Meadowlands, just across the highway from a Home Depot. Now it would be another fifteen hours before he would see an actual bed. He hated it when stupid people— all people, really—made him do stupid things. Like dumping twelve 463L master pallets of perfectly good American dollars, each weighing almost four thousand pounds, out the back end of his C-17’s massive hold and into a patch of the world’s ugliest desert. He knew exactly where all that money would end up: in the hands of some of the world’s worst people who would use it to buy weapons that would destroy nations that had not attacked the U.S. and posed no threat.

Ever since the Coalition Provisional Authority—the legally dubious governmental body that oversaw the festival of chaos, blood, and greed that was post-invasion Iraq—had pioneered the risible strategy of using U.S. dollars as a prime engine of U.S. foreign policy and military strategy, billions of greenbacks, measured by the ton and delivered by long-haul aircraft, had poured out over the Middle East. “Al-mutar lakhdar,” the Arabs called it. Green rain. The equation was simple: cash from above or death from above. A bribe or a drone strike. Take the money and we’ll pretend to be friends. Don’t and we’ll be enemies.

Major Arnold’s co directed his attention to the display on which she had plotted new coordinates for the drop: fifty-five miles south of al-Tanf, a flat patch of sand in the Rwaished District, Jordan. Three miles west of the Iraqi border and a mile north of the Baghdad International Highway, the region’s only major artery, stretching across mostly empty desert from Baghdad, through Jordan, and all the way to the Mediterranean.

Arnold hadn’t seen one of these last-minute diversions in years, not since the cowboy days of looting and shooting after Baghdad fell. No explanation then either. Whoever gave the order had to have some serious stroke.

“Where’s this coming from?” Arnold tapped his fingers.

“Army two-star, Major General Thomas Taylor.”

“Never heard of him.” He crumpled the printout into a ball and tossed it aside. “Reason they’re having us drop our load in the middle of nowhere is they don’t want anyone to see who picks up all that dough. Us included.”

“The guy’s very low profile. Delta. Ran JSOC in Iraq and Afghanistan,” James said. “He just moved into some big new Pentagon job.”

Typical, thought Arnold as he settled deeper into his seat, probably more of a politician than a soldier. The cargo manifest identified the source of their shipment as frozen Syrian accounts traceable right back to leaders of the Syrian army, Syrian Military intelligence—the al-Mukhabarat—and Asma al-Assad, the stunning, cold-hearted wife of Syria’s dictator.

“Just to be sure, ask for confirmation.” “

Already have,” replied the copilot. “It’s Taylor’s call sign. Looks like it’s his operation.”

Arnold stared out the window, resigned. The new kind of war. Someone else’s country, someone else’s money. But, always, American lives. My last tour.

“Okay then, punch it in. We’re heading for Jordan.”

Three hours later, Arnold took a wide turn over the sprawling refugee camp outside of Rwaished, a small city grown fat on smuggling in the years since the Assad family and the American army had turned the neighborhood into a permanent war zone. He brought the plane down to fifteen hundred feet to take a look: nothing for miles except a few dusty buildings at the Al Karamah border crossing, some camels, and corduroy dunes. And God only knew how many stinger missiles, AK-47s, IEDs, and roving bands of Syrian regular army, Islamic State bandits, Syrian rebels, and local tribes playing all sides against one another.

At the drop point, six Humvees, two semitrailers, and several heavy-duty forklifts. Half a dozen people in the lee of the trucks. A few hundred yards off from the cluster of semis and Humvees, Arnold spotted three GAZ-2330 Tigrs, the Russian equivalent of a Humvee, just sitting there. That made no sense. Russians and Americans kept their distance in Syria, engaging only through deconfliction lines and through proxies. He’d been making these runs for years, and this was a first. So many shadows in a land with so little shade.

Arnold tipped his wings, acknowledging the crew on the ground, and took a wide turn as he descended. At one thousand feet, James opened the rear cargo door. Even after hundreds of drops, it was still a rush—the roar of air, the light flooding into the plane’s dark cabin, the heat rising from the desert, and the earth unrolling beneath them, all framed by the jagged maw of the cargo door.

At five hundred feet, two miles from the target, Arnold gave the all clear and James released the floor brakes. Slowly at first, and then thwack, thwack, thwack twelve times, a pallet every second, followed by a parachute blooming in the desert sky.

Arnold took the C-17 up and turned to catch the view. A lovely, crazy, breathtaking sight. Twenty-four million one-hundred-dollar bills, floating gently toward the hard sand.