Death of a Contractor

Leaving the base, Manelick hits it hard, pushing his Hyundai Galloper fast out of the gate. He pulls away from Phillips and Tuncay -- 50 yards, 100 yards. They can see him ahead, pausing for an instant where the road outside Anaconda splits north and south. And then he's gone.

Five minutes later, a click or two up the road, Phillips' satellite phone rings. Tuncay answers. All he can hear is hysterical yelling on the other end, someone shouting in Arabic. Tuncay doesn't understand the language, so he hands the phone to the driver, Aydin, who listens for a moment and then begins screaming. "They shoot Ryan!" he says. "Ryan is gone, Ryan is dead! Ryan is dead, Ryan is dead! Ryan is dead!"

Ultra services was founded not long after the invasion of Iraq by John Dawkins, a thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur from California looking for a big score. Dawkins, who was based in Moscow at the time, had come to Russia a few years after college, trying his hand at everything from fish hatcheries to the oil industry. But eleven years in, he was broke and discouraged. A telecom business he had started had drained every last cent, and he was desperate. "I had $80,000 in debt at that time," he says. "I had $20 in my pocket, all my credit cards maxed out, and I said, 'Whoa, where do I go from here?' "

Dawkins is a powerful and charismatic personality. His friends call him J-Dom, or John the Dominator. A chaser of the big life, an addict to the dramatic and grand, he rode into his own wedding, to a Kazakh woman he had met in Russia, on a white horse, wearing a magician's cape for the ceremony. "Travel with John and you were immediately cast in the role of Marlow to his Kurtz," his friend Franz Wisner recalled. "He's the type who, given the choice of two paths, would choose a machete."

Despite his mounting debts, Dawkins wasn't about to scurry home to California in failure. In March 2003, a week after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, he sent out a group e-mail to family and friends announcing that he was relocating to Turkey, along with his wife and daughter, to start a new business. Ultra Services would take advantage of the hellish heat and sandstorms of Iraq by providing containerized housing units for the troops, many of whom were sleeping in tents or under any shelter they could find. The trailers would be supplied by Turkish vendors, trucked into Iraq and sold to the military at a substantial markup.

In April, as Baghdad and Mosul and Tikrit fell, Dawkins made his first visit to Iraq in a rented van, with a fake press pass, to lay the groundwork for Ultra Services. "You got to understand," he says now, "things didn't get radical until much later -- it felt safe. I walked around the streets of Fallujah in April." He hired Charles Phillips, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate of Harvard and Stanford, to oversee the financial side of the company in Turkey. But he needed someone to take charge of day-to-day operations in Iraq -- a foreman who could supervise installation of the company's trailers in some of the country's deadliest war zones.

He found that someone through one of his closest friends: Greg Manelick, a career Air Force officer on inactive duty. The two men got to know each other in Russia in 1997 while working on a huge oil project for ExxonMobil; Dawkins handled public relations, and Manelick oversaw logistics. The two men hung out together, exercised together, saw each other through marriages and divorces. When Manelick heard that Dawkins was setting up shop in Iraq, he steered his son Ryan to Ultra Services.

The elder Manelick had been a young father; he was only seventeen when Ryan was born. Things weren't always easy between them: Greg was away for long stretches in the military, and he and Ryan's mother divorced when Ryan was nine. "The pent-up anger Ryan had toward his father was very apparent," Dawkins would later write. "Ryan feared his dad and had that 'Dad can always kick my ass and win' attitude."