Death of a Contractor

Ryan Manelick climbs behind the wheel of his white 4x4. He's got a 9mm pistol and an MP5 automatic submachine gun in the car, $17,000 in a Jordanian bank account and a plane ticket home. It is December 14th, 2003 -- his thirty-first birthday -- and in less than a week he'll be headed to Pennsylvania to visit his mother and spend Christmas with his kids. Then he'll fly to Russia to see his father and relax. It will be the first time he has left Iraq in months.

It's late morning as Manelick pulls out of Camp Anaconda, a U.S. Army base in Balad, forty-five miles northwest of Baghdad. He's come to check on some trailers that his contracting company, Ultra Services, has sold to the American military to use as living quarters and office space. Business has been booming since May, when Paul Bremer, the man sent by President Bush to run the Coalition Provisional Authority, gave foreign investors the right to take 100 percent of their profits out of Iraq, tax-free. "Iraq," Bremer declared, "is open for business." The country became an enormous piggy bank busted wide open. Small-time contractors like Ultra Services began to flood into Iraq, but unlike Halliburton and other corporate competitors, they had no security convoys to protect them -- they were on their own. It was about as open a season as seasons get; the cash was just there to be carted off, palletfuls of fresh $100 bills airlifted in from the United States. "I've never seen a more corrupt environment than Iraq was under Bremer and the CPA," says one private contractor with decades of experience in war zones. "They had no idea what they were doing. The system was just about as perfectly set up for bribery and kickbacks as it possibly could be."

Manelick is right in the thick of this lawless environment. Ultra Services supplies the Army with everything from shower heads to cartons of Coca-Cola, but the trailers are its main business: simple containers, only twenty feet by ten, trucked over the Turkish border at up to $5,400 a pop. A single shipment can bring in $1 million, cash. "Since I am in at the ground floor, I should do pretty well for myself over here," Manelick e-mailed his friends and family from Turkey, shortly before heading off to Iraq. "To give you a feeling for why I say that, we just sent a contract out to the U.S. Army. We are pretty confident that they will sign it. If they do, it is a $22,500,000.00 contract. That is right, 22 million." His colleague at Ultra Services, Charles Phillips, put it even more bluntly. "We see the gold," Phillips e-mailed a co-worker. "We just need the shovels."

On this morning, as Manelick checks out the trailers at Anaconda, he jokes around with Phillips and Bora Tuncay, another colleague from Turkey. They laugh about girls, about getting the hell out of Iraq. Then they split up. Phillips and Tuncay head north, beginning the long trip back to the company's headquarters in Istanbul. Manelick, accompanied by two Iraqi employees of Ultra Services, heads south, taking the dangerous road through the Sunni Triangle to Baghdad. His bodyguard and fixer, a former Iraqi Army colonel named Majid Kadom, has failed to show up this morning, and although Manelick doesn't like to travel without Kadom, he isn't worried. Half a year of making his way across Iraq, outside the Green Zone, has left him feeling almost invincible. He thinks he knows everything he needs to about staying alive in the midst of a war.