Chapter 541

I listened while Robert explained all EIT had been doing with the information from the two Princes and the two arms dealer’s computers.

The list of customers on the arms dealer’s computers was eye opening. I was sure that both Bens would be very interested in some of those countries and groups and what they had acquired.

I was more interested in the locations of the sales and deliveries. And then, what was sold and delivered there.

Small arms rifles and pistols were everywhere. Hundreds of millions made, sold, lost, captured all over the world. With every war, every skirmish, there was always a flood of rifles and ammo to both sides.

The Taliban was using rifles against the Russians that were left over from the WW1 and WW2 and later; American, British, Spanish, German and Russian bolt action, semiautomatic and machine guns. There were warehouses all over Europe and the world that were filled with crates of weapons and pallets of ammunition in case a new world war appeared overnight.

The Chinese and the Russians were the worst for selling old weapons to any group; the AK47 was a third world favorite. It was easy to disassemble and clean, and worked well in all environments. Nearly every rifle we had burned in the La Jarita raid had been an AK47.

As long as it was kept dry, ammunition could last a century or more. There was ammunition from the Spanish American war still showing up on the net. The weak spot was the primer. Some chemical mixtures used to make the primer to make the round to go bang deteriorated with time and would not fire.

The UN even tried to force ammo manufactures to come up with primer materials that had a life a shelf of no more than two years as a way to end so many conflicts and put an end to so many stockpiles. It was a foolhardy thought with billions of rounds already in warehouses.

Black powder used in Civil War and cannon balls were still as deadly as the day they were made, even if it had been wet and dried. Hikers were still finding stacked up cannon balls that has been left along the trails and battlefields during the Civil War and they were still deadly.

Just a few years ago a Virginia Civil War enthusiast blew himself and his house apart trying to remove the fuse and black powder in some he had found on the Appalachian Trail.

It was an arms cycle; every time armies were issued newer, more modern weapons, the older weapons went into the warehouses. A few were transferred to civilians while most sat in the warehouses until the next potential ally needed weapons for self defense; that is where the arms dealers came in.

They were the middle men. Governments let them handle the transactions, “You are to sell them to this group but not that group or country.” It allowed the politicians to deny direct involvement.

It was weapons from those arms dealers that had killed my men in Morocco and tried to kill them in Kampala and Windhoek.

It was one more reason I had a bad taste for politics, especially international politics - the worst of the bunch.

I looked over the sales closely for heavy weapons that could be used against the embassies; RPGs, mortars, shoulder fired rockets and Stingers. Those were all bad news and I wanted to know if they had been sold to any anti-American groups in those areas.

As Robert continued, things got worse. EIT had maintained surveillance of all the people who were in the contact list of the Princes, the arms dealers, Balthazar, and Saif’s computers. As with all things on the internet, when one link opened it led to dozens more. Over time they had been able to break the passwords.

The Prince’s email contained several leaders of Hezbollah; proxies of Iran.

Iran now knew I was responsible for the aggressive interrogation of Balthazar and that information was making the rounds. They were plotting revenge. They were planning to bring it up at the UN that the US and the task force was using torture and afterwards organizing a protest in Washington. They had operatives emailing sympathetic members of Congress as though they were US citizens.