Warrior Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  The recon guys moved fluidly and let him pass them, as they journeyed further in. About five feet in to the long, alarmingly well-lit tunnel he heard it too. The screams of a young girl. Heedless, terror-filled, and continuous.

  They were not words, they were not prayers or tears. They were just screams of pure terror.

  He stopped for a split second and then nodded once. All three broke into a run and sprinted the last five hundred yards till they came to a wooden door that the leader simply ran through with his momentum. The door splintered apart, because it had been shoddily constructed and couldn’t withstand assault from an eighty-five kilo fit male.

  The recon guys swung their weapons in a wide arc while the leader advanced quietly.

  “All clear,” Anil murmured.

  “All clear,” echoed Vishnu.

  The room, had a table and a freezer that probably held body parts. Unfortunately, it was empty of both Alina Gujjar, the teenage daughter of industrialist Mahesh Gujjar, and any guard foolish and smart enough to escape detection from heat-signature scopes. There was a well-lit opening that led to the next room.

  The leader walked toward the room where the screams were loudest.

  His heart was slow, his breathing steady and he had acute tunnel vision. He could only see the next step, the next movement, his adrenaline on punch-high and his reflexes cold purpose.

  “Going in to retrieve package,” he murmured. “Radio silence from here on.”

  He stepped into the room.

  The scream and the sight in the room stopped his heart.

  ~~~~~

  Alina, a slender girl in filthy jeans and a torn white sweater, was crying loud enough to shake the rock walls. Her shoulder-length hair was matted and she was bound to a ring on the cave’s rock wall. Her hands were tied to a wire looped through the ring and were jerked tight enough to have almost cut off circulation.

  She was not gagged, but her legs were stretched in front of her in a loose binding, a length of wire running around her ankles through to a covered contraption on the side.

  “Shit.”

  The leader moved forward and placed his weapon on the floor beside him for easy reach. He knelt down in front of the girl and touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  She screamed harder as she saw the painted face and hell-black eyes, the camo outfit and the utter sense of menace he exuded. Her eyes open in permanent petrification; she was hysterical.

  “Hi, Alina, I’m Krivi,” he said, gently. “I’m going to get you out. I promise.”

  “Wha—what?” she whimpered, tears running streaks down her muddy cheeks.

  “I am going to get you out in five minutes.”

  “But—there is a…there is a…” Sobs started shaking her thin shoulders and she hung her head and just wept. A hopeless, wrenching sound that should have melted the hardest, stoniest heart.

  But Krivi, had no heart that anyone knew of so he just touched the girl on the shoulder, with a little more pressure this time. Enough so that she looked up.

  “Alina, listen to me. Will you listen to me?”

  She nodded, her eyes streaming anyway.

  “Stop crying. Can you do that?”

  “I…I…”

  “Brave girls cry once the adventure is over. And you’re a brave girl, aren’t you?” He spoke in a quiet, reassuring tone.

  That just set the girl off again.

  Krivi considered his options and looked back at Anil. “Det cord.” He nodded at the girl’s feet, indicating the detonation cord attached to the covered contraption.

  “Shit.”

  “I’ll look into it. You get the girl out. Now.”

  “Roger that.”

  Krivi moved away from the girl but she screamed, so he turned back and said, “I am here, Alina. This is my friend Anil. He’s going to untie your hands. If you stay still, it won't hurt at all. Can you do that?”

  “Kri…Krivi,” It was a small whisper from a terrified girl.

  Krivi smiled, even though it felt like stretching taffy. “Yes, Alina?”

  “There’s a lock. On my neck. There’s a lock.”

  His smile faded as he shared a grim look with Anil. Anil had already removed a small wire cutter that could run through steel nylon rope if it needed to.

  “I am going to unlock it and you’re going to be out of here right now,” Krivi said.

  Alina’s lips trembled as she looked at the calm, rock-like face of the man kneeling before her, but she refused to cry again. And Krivi gave her points for that. It took a lot of guts to not give in when the situation went FUBAR – fucked up beyond all recognition.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  He nodded and held out his hand. She took it with trembling fingers and just held on.

  Krivi squeezed once and then barked, “Scoot her forward. Give me specs. I am going to look at that.”

  He turned to the gunnysack-covered contraption where the wire tying Alina’s legs disappeared under it. He removed the gunnysack carefully knowing any movement could be trickily fatal.

  Bombs were like that.

  It wasn’t a very smartly made IED (improvised explosive device). It had a black cylinder with three different wires protruding out of it, and a small pin held the mouth of the cylinder shut. A few sticks of C4 were strapped to the outer body of the cylinder, as if to underline the point of an explosion. The three wires, all yellow, ran to a hole under the wall and then disappeared.

  “Now we know why they left no guards,” he murmured, almost to himself.

  “Yeah,” Anil said flatly.

  But he smiled reassuringly at the girl and said something too low for Krivi to hear. Alina smiled and let him reach for a clean piece of cloth and wiped her face with it.

  Krivi focused all his attention on the IED.

  It was a pretty standard bomb, with a decent-sized blast radius given the amount of C4 wrapped around the cylinder. The detonation cord was a trap, designed to confuse and fluster and the trigger mechanism was probably pressure-controlled, rather than remote-controlled.

  Hence, the lock on the girl.

  Krivi unsnapped a pair of pliers and carefully removed the main firing pin from the mouth of the cylinder and laid it on the floor. He looked at the wire disappearing into the wall and knew there was no way they could remove it all out without setting off the pressure mechanism on the trigger, even though he hadn’t even seen the trigger yet.

  Krivi unsnapped his throwing knife, a tiny thing with a blade so sharp it could slice the hide of an elephant, and started severing the C4 from the cylinder. It took moments, because the kidnappers had just tied the packets to the outside.

  That done, he carefully wrapped the explosive in tarp and placed it in his backpack.

  Vishnu ran out of the room with his backpack. Half the firepower was gone right there.

  Now he turned his attention to the girl who was, somehow, miraculously calm.

  “Alina.”

  She looked at him with a small smile and he froze infinitesimally, feeling a tiny bit of surprise at her resilience.

  “Will you let me look at the lock now?”

  She nodded and Anil carefully pushed all her hair to the front while she presented him with her nape.

  The three wires came out of the wall and ended in a tiny device that was locked together with a padlock taped to the back of Alina’s neck. The reading on the device read 45 kgs. The girl’s weight. Anymore and she would blow them all to hell.

  He couldn’t touch the thing without setting it off. And he couldn’t touch the wires without setting it off.

  “The lock,” Anil began.

  Krivi looked up, nodded approval. The lock itself could be reached from the top. If he was careful enough and steady enough, and he could then, maybe, gain the three seconds required to sever the connection from the girl.

  Big maybe.

  “All right. Get out,” he said.

  Anil shook his head.

  “That’s
an order.”

  “Not following it, boss.”

  “Bastard.” But it was said without any heat and made Alina smile.

  Krivi smiled at her too, a flash of white on a betel-brown face and said, “That’s a bad word, Alina. Don’t use it in front of your dad. And don’t tell him I used it either.”

  “I promise.” She smiled again.

  “I need you to hold absolutely still, Alina. Totally still.”

  The girl held her breath.

  Krivi unfolded to a kneeling position and crawled beside Alina.

  Two

  Anil stood back and watched as his leader inspected the tiny device and the lock over it. It was going to be delicate as a surgery, getting to the lock without touching the trigger mechanism or the wires.

  Krivi removed a cigarette from his pocket and looked at it for a second. He smiled, a strange, weird smile and put it back in his pocket.

  Anil watched as Krivi stooped over Alina’s head, his hands rock-steady as he used a pair of picks on the lock. He twisted one, and it stuck in the place of the key, then he used the other one, without moving the position of the lock - which was impossible - and used the other pick to snick the lock open.

  It worked after three seconds of quiet breathing and absolute, deafening silence.

  The lock opened and the pressure mechanism moved.

  Alina breathed deeply, her shoulders shaking and Krivi snapped the lock back, but not all the way back to lock it.

  Anil breathed easy.

  “Alina?” Krivi said.

  “Yes, Krivi?”

  “I am going to remove the lock now, all the way out and I want you to leap into Anil’s strong arms and just hold on, okay? He’s going to run really, really fast and take you out of here. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anil, you ready to take my girl out?”

  Anil’s lips tightened but he said easily, “Alina’s my girl, Krivi. Don’t poach.”

  “We’ll let Alina decide. Right, Alina?”

  She giggled, but didn’t nod her head. She was aware of the lock on the back of her head.

  “On the count of three,” Krivi said quietly.

  Anil nodded slightly, because he got it. There was a growing chance that Krivi was not going to make it out in time, but there was not a damn thing he could do about it right now.

  “Boss,” was all he said.

  “One.” Krivi’s steady hand, went to the lock. “Two.” He flicked it open, sliding it out and pushing Alina away in one motion.

  “Three.”

  Anil snatched the girl and ran straight and true, without a backward glance.

  ~~~~~

  Krivi didn’t spare them a glance either, he held the pressure mechanism gingerly as a timer started counting down the seconds.

  He had twenty seconds before he cut the wrong wire and blew himself to kingdom come.

  “Five,” he murmured, measuring the position of the wires from the detonator. All three yellow wires ended in a tangle, so he wasn’t sure anyway that he wasn’t going to be blown up.

  “Eight.”

  He picked one out and held his pliers over it.

  “Twelve.” He picked the next one out and his fingers trembled in fine reaction.

  He steadied his hand and cut the wire. The timer stopped its deathly countdown.

  Krivi placed the pressure mechanism detonator down as carefully as if it was still alive. He tapped his ear-bud. It crackled in his ear.

  “Hot load is cold. I repeat, hot load is cold. Coming out now. How’s the girl? She all right?”

  There was no answer from the other end for a minute. And he waited, while sweat poured off his face in rivulets, even though the temperature inside the cave was close to five degrees. The black face paint ran off, washed by his perspiration and his hand was steady again as he pushed the pliers back into his knife kit and shoved it into his pocket.

  “Boss?” His beta said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get the fuck out of there. Now.”

  Krivi chuckled, a strange ghostly sound in a tomb.

  “Yeah. Roger that.”

  Then he slung his weapon on again and walked out, as calmly as he had come in.

  ~~~~~

  Krivi breathed clean of the fresh air at the mouth of the cave entrance. It did nothing to settle the numbness in him. The momentary pleasure he’d got from cheating death once more had dissipated.

  “BSF just sent word. The kidnappers have been caught at the market. They’re in custody as we speak.” Vishnu handed him his backpack, without Krivi asking for it.

  “The package?” Krivi opened the Velcro of his upper breast pocket and removed the cigarette kept there.

  “Already on its way with John and Anil.” Vishnu answered. “She’s in remarkable spirits for someone who’s gone through an ordeal.”

  Krivi shrugged. “You up for a trek downhill or you want to wait for the HumVee to come back?”

  “We’ll wait.” Vishnu nodded at the other two men in the group. Sitting on the hard, cold ground without worrying about their asses or the state of their clothing. “Get the party started.” Vishnu smiled at the sight of his mates cracking open a beer in the early morning chill of the Himalayas, while the other one called his wife and spoke to her softly.

  “Okay.”

  Krivi shouldered his backpack and moved away from the group. He wanted to trek it down, get back to their hotel room and get ready for the next mission. Drinking was a weakness Krivi didn’t afford himself anymore.

  And as for family… the ones still surviving, had long since lost hope trying to connect with him.

  It had been months since he had even spoken to his parents settled in a palatial retirement community in Coimbatore. He was back in India after four years, with relatives scattered in Chennai, Ooty and Bengaluru who would love for him to visit. Aunts, uncles and second cousins who were still waiting for him to respond in the family WhatsApp group.

  His dad’s brother, Gopal Perippa, was a true Gandhian who never approved of the violence of Krivi’s job.

  So he was all alone in the truest sense of the word.

  Krivi placed his backpack by his feet and looked out at the majestic beauty spread before him: the white-tipped Himalayas which were particularly beautiful as the sun hit snowy peaks turning them all shades of pink.

  He breathed in deep of the unadulterated, mountainous air. They said that lack of oxygen at high altitude made you light-headed. He’d been taught by the best instructors in the world that you could breathe anywhere in the world, if you only knew how.

  That was all that mattered in the end. Learning to breathe.

  He contemplated smoking his cigarette when there was a peculiar beeping from his backpack.

  Krivi extracted a bulky instrument that vaguely resembled a cellular phone. A satellite phone with the latest scrambler codes that bounced between at least three satellites. There was no one in the world that had this number. He’d copped it because it was the only way he could call his family and be completely untraceable. He pressed a button and said, very quietly, “Iyer.”

  “Hello, Krivi, my boy. You’ve been a hard man to track.”

  Krivi sat down on the ground abruptly.

  “Harold,” he said, shortly. “How did you find me?”

  ~~~~~~

  Harold Wozniacki, Assistant Director of Operations MI5, laughed gregariously, a jarring sound.

  “What do you want, Harold?” he asked, when there was a break in the laughter.

  “Do you want to know how I found you, Krivi?”

  Krivi shook his head. “No. Whatever it is, the answer’s no. You know that.”

  “Hey, maybe my kid has been kidnapped and I need you to rescue him. Defuse a bomb or two along the way,” Harold replied, still chuckling.

  “You have a son, Harold. And he is in the Army. If someone has taken him, they would have already lost a limb or two…” Krivi paused a beat. “Or their head
.”

  His mind was rapidly clicking along. He’d never defused a bomb threat before today, because most kidnappers were interested only in the money. Kidnapping and ransom was a tense field to work in but it was goddamn predictable – at most, they used threats like sending the victim’s ears or toes or fingers.

  Harold must have spread his tentacles wide to get this much current intel on him. Probably even called in a few favors.

  “I thought you would have forgotten all about me by now, Krivi. It’s been almost four years, hasn’t it?”

  “I never forget, Harold. You know that.”

  There was a beat of silence and then Harold exhaled. “What do you know about The Woodpecker?”

  “The bird? Not much.” But he sat up straighter. “Why do you ask, Harold?”

  “A series of bombings in Benghazi,” Harold answered instantly. “Car bombs. IEDs, with circuitry fucked up so badly it would have taken a rat to clear it. Remote detonation on startup. Semtex and plastique as primary explosives, with marble shrapnel. Recognize it?”

  Krivi’s vision sharpened, his breath slowed, his heart slowed. He gripped the phone so tight, his knuckles showed veins. “What are you saying, Harold?”

  “You know what I am saying, Krivi. Come back, and you can find the son of a bitch who took out Joe and Gemma.”

  “No.” The word was short and cold.

  “The Woodpecker is a dangerous entity. No fear, no consequences. But no one can catch him because there are rumors about identity, no confirmations. He’s a gun-for-hire type and with no moral compass to guide him. People are getting hurt, Krivi. Hundreds of people. You can help stop that.”

  Krivi’s other hand clenched in a fist. His short nails dug into the skin of his palms. “No, Harold. Goodbye.”

  “There’s a face and features match,” Harold said quickly before Krivi could hang up. “Eyes, skin color, mom’s date of death, and DOB. It’s with a female civilian. 90% chance of siblings. It’s all in the packet I have put together for you. That’s a huge chance for someone we haven’t ever seen on any known security database. We need confirmation. The female is in India, in Kashmir. Transpo wouldn’t be a problem for you. You can nail The Woodpecker.”