Warrior Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  “You should have died,” Hannah snarled.

  ~~~~~

  Krivi shook his head, not removing his eyes off the woman in the yellow silk shirt. Although every instinct he possessed was yelling at him, screaming at him like sirens blaring to get to Ziya right now. She was just feet away.

  Just feet away…

  Bleeding and broken like a wounded animal but she was breathing…dear god, let her be breathing….

  “I didn’t. You’re going to.”

  Hannah laughed, and it was the sound of the truly insane. Krivi looked at Tom and shot off a bullet that went straight into The Woodpecker’s thigh and came out the other side. She looked in surprise at the slow-spreading wound, her laugh winding down in a gasp of surprise.

  She looked uncertainly at Tom, who was only standing, watching, a gun leveled at her.

  “Dad…”

  Tom shook his head. “You went too far. You went too far, Wood. You killed Raoul and Maria and his whole family. Her whole family. I knew the time had come for me to…end our relationship.”

  Krivi peppered the ground beneath Hannah’s feet with bullets so she couldn’t make a damn move without him hitting her. She clutched her wounded leg and started at the man she called father with wide, hurting eyes.

  “You were becoming dangerous. A liability. I needed to make sure you were…taken out in an entirely credible manner.”

  “What?”

  “Why?”

  Krivi asked one question and Hannah the other.

  Tom shrugged and walked forward, to where Ziya was slumped unconscious in a pool of her own blood. Hannah didn’t tell her dad to not touch the woman, she was too surprised by Tom’s answer.

  “It all had to be planned carefully. Executed with split-second precision. No one could get the slightest bit suspicious because then you’d become a fucking martyr and I’d have ten more Woodpeckers to deal with and dispose of, when the time came.” Tom was being so blatantly callous, almost cruel the way he was addressing Hannah that Krivi could feel his own attention waver.

  “Who are you?” he asked again.

  “Precisely who you think I am. Who do you think set this whole thing up, Mr. Iyer?” Tom asked conversationally.

  “Harold…” Krivi shook his head. “Harold’s informant. Jesus.” He breathed. “You were behind everything then? When Harold turned you, you wanted that. You wanted to be caught and lead us to The Woodpecker.”

  “Took you guys nearly a year to get there, in the end, didn’t it? And so many innocent people had to die before you guys could get your shit together.”

  Tom untied Ziya and gently lay her to rest, running a gentle hand over her red-tipped hair...

  Hannah’s breaths got angrier as she saw the careful, tender way with which Tom was handling the girl. Her sister.

  “That’s not my sister,” she yelled.

  Tom smiled tenderly. “That’s my daughter,” he told Hannah, and then, turning to Krivi, “I had to use my own daughter as bait in the end, Krivi. So you must know how much I mean business.”

  Krivi shook his head. He had thought he knew, what the man was up to, but even he couldn’t have guessed at the depths to which Tom had sunk, or the power he wielded.

  “Was all of it a setup then?”

  “Apart from the bomb around Alina’s neck, yeah. All of it was.”

  A sudden horrific thought struck him. “Pehelgam?”

  Tom smiled. “Insurgents are always looking for targets, Iyer. You know that. All they need is the proper motivation and…material.”

  “You wanted me to come closer to Ziya. To try and infiltrate her life.”

  “I needed you to get seriously involved with life again… so you could kill.”

  “You picked me.”

  Tom didn’t refute the statement.

  Krivi saw Hannah start crying because her father was stroking Ziya’s hair as if she were someone precious. Her face contorted in an ugly morass of love, longing and utter hate.

  “I picked you because Wood was never supposed to execute the London job the way it was. You should have died in the initial explosion too. It was a message that was being sent to your…people.”

  “You mean, your people,” Krivi reminded him.

  Tom shrugged. “I have no sides anymore, boy. I play the cards I have been dealt. If not her, it would have been someone else. If not you, it would have been someone else.”

  “And you used your child as bait.”

  In the distance, they could hear the sound of a number of vehicles approaching the field. And it didn’t sound like the Indian Army.

  “You’re tagged.” Tom sighed.

  Krivi didn’t deny it.

  “How long do I have?”

  “Two minutes. Maybe less.”

  Tom smiled again, a cold, regret-filled smile and took his daughter in his arms and carried her over to Krivi, who grabbed hold of her the second their fingers made contact.

  Tom’s other daughter was crying hysterically, rocking herself back and forth on the expensive shag pile carpet, in the pool of blood that belonged to Ziya.

  “Get her out of here.”

  Krivi clutched Ziya tighter, so horribly glad to hear the threadiest sound of breathing rattle in her chest.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I will.”

  And then he threw his gun on the ground, next to the unhinged terrorist and the blood of the woman he loved and he took off.

  Fifty-Three

  Tom turned to look at Hannah who seemed to have lost all her powers of speech after yelling that Ziya wasn’t her sister. Her mind finally seemed to have fully snapped, which, Tom thought, regretfully, was a damn shame.

  She had been the finest he had ever trained or unleashed.

  Too bad, she hadn’t been as easy to control as to break.

  “Next time, pick someone less fucked up, Jones,” he murmured to himself.

  He put his hands up as the sound of booted feet came up the stairs and what seemed like a battalion of soldiers poured into the small plane,

  “Don’t shoot, please,” he ordered as he knelt on the cold, hard ground. “I’m CIA.”

  Twenty odd soldiers pointed their rifles at Tom Jones and the terrorist formerly known as The Woodpecker, but who was just a trembling, hysterical mass of lost humanity.

  “You have ID?” The leader spoke up.

  Tom nodded. “In my jacket pocket. You can check if you want.”

  The leader nodded and one of the soldiers came forward just as there was a terrible scream from behind Tom. As one they all looked at the crying woman and the thing she held in her hand.

  A pin grenade.

  “You’re not my father,” she sobbed.

  “Hannah…”

  “I’m The WOODPECKER…”

  Hannah thumbed the pin out and then threw the grenade down just as twenty guns shot twenty bullets onto her body and there was the most terrible explosion as the grenade hit the ground and the world ended for Tom Jones and The Woodpecker and everyone else caught in the crossfire of one man’s crusade and quest for the perfect killing machine.

  ~~~~~

  The ground shook beneath Krivi’s thundering feet as he held Ziya close to his heart and simply ran through the base, not pausing to breathe, not pausing to think about where he was going.

  He just wanted out of here. He took them into a glade of trees on the other end of base, away from all human contact.

  Finally, he stumbled on a gnarled tree root and almost dropped Ziya when he fell to his knees. He saved her from further injury by twisting his body sideways so his already shredded back took even more of a hit.

  And brought Ziya closer into his arms.

  And brought her awake.

  She stirred, the faintest of sighs escaping her mouth.

  “Ziya, Ziya,” he whispered as he sat up, cradling her next to his living, beating heart.

  Infinitely glad that there was still a heartbeat for him to live for. That there was Ziya to live for.


  “Kri…Krivi.” Her voice was soundless.

  “Yeah.” He sighed, loudly. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  She said something that he couldn’t catch the first time. So he bent closer to her and asked softly, “What? What did you say, love?”

  “Home,” Ziya croaked, tears leaking out of her eyes again.

  Tears of pain and relief and terrible, consuming grief coming out of the very depths of her soul that there was no stopping them. Not anymore. Not ever again.

  “I want to go home.”

  And he nodded. Because he understood too, what home was...who home was.

  But now was not the time to talk about that. About how she was the only thing that mattered from now on. And how much he needed her and wanted her and loved her.

  Loved her…

  “Yes,” he said, holding her close, her arms creeping around his back, his neck in a feeble attempt that made him feel as if he could conquer the world.

  “Let’s go back home, Ziya.”

  And he kept his promise and took her back home.

  Fifty-Four

  Goonj,

  Srinagar, Kashmir

  A few months later

  Ziya took a deep breath of the fresh mountain air.

  It was good to be back home, she thought. Good to breathe.

  The events of the last year were not so fresh, so vital here. Death didn’t hurt as much here, because the valley had already seen so much, its earth soaked with the blood of the fallen that death was just a part of life here.

  People went to work, went home, ate and loved their families, knowing exactly every moment that it could be their last. It didn’t deter them from living.

  They lived all the better for it.

  “Noor,” Ziya whispered in the still morning air, holding onto the balcony railing of Noor’s room with peculiar intensity.

  “I miss you every day. I love you every day.”

  Her voice became stronger with every word. “I want to tell you that things are better now. I don’t feel so…detached anymore. And I am okay. Happy. I know you are too. You’re with Sam, aren’t you? You always wanted to be with Sam. So God gave you what you wanted.”

  Ziya closed her eyes as a fresh, poignant wave of grief hit her.

  The bruises on her face, hands and neck were fading with time and medical care. The back gash had healed because Hannah Jones had actually patched it up well. The knife wound on her thigh occasionally twinged after all these weeks, if she moved wrong, but that was the extent of her physical injuries.

  Being home had taken care of that.

  And now that there was no vendetta, no one to hunt and kill, the grief caught up with her. Unexpectedly, cruelly, and she let it batter her. The waves of mourning and grief turning into tears and quiet sobs that shook her shoulders and came from her heart.

  “I love you, Nuria. I love you, Sam. Be at peace,” she whispered.

  ~~~~~

  “I think they already are,” Krivi said.

  Ziya whirled around, mortified at being caught crying again. She put a hasty hand to her wet cheeks and tried to stem the flow of the miserable tears. Her eyes filled afresh as she saw the dusty duffel bag and backpack he carried in either hand.

  He was dressed in the same clothes as he always had been. Worn jeans, a simple shirt and his jacket thrown over it. No sweater in freezing weather for the original mountain man.

  She noted, vaguely, that his brown-black hair was curling well past his collar, which meant that he hadn’t gotten it cut yet.

  And his face, that beloved, dear face was hard again. No lines of strain and tenderness softening it.

  But, he didn’t have a scar from his encounter with Tom Jones and Hannah Jones and for that she was grateful. The scars he carried inside were punishment enough.

  For both of them.

  “You’re leaving then.”

  ~~~~~

  Krivi nodded, shifted to grip his bags tighter, feeling a tightness in his chest he had always come to associate with her.

  Ziya.

  The only woman on the planet who made crying look heartbreakingly beautiful. Who was so heartbreakingly beautiful she made his chest hurt.

  “Yeah, Harold wants to…there’s a new guy on the scene…we suspect the Taliban but we aren’t sure.”

  “The Taliban.”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t know what else to say.

  Didn’t know how to say goodbye, because he wasn’t sure goodbye was what he wanted to say. These last few weeks, being here, even if DA had as good as forbidden them to share a room, so he more often than not snuck out before daybreak: recuperating, healing, watching Ziya heal had been restful.

  Peaceful.

  He had felt better.

  And he had sworn never to feel anything again.

  As he looked at Ziya’s shadowed, mist-grey eyes and the quiver in her soft lips, he felt a whole host of emotions he knew he had no business feeling. She had been through a terrible trying ordeal.

  She had confused gratitude with love and he, like a fool, wanted to continue perpetuating that lie because it made him feel…loved.

  He had sworn never to be loved again too.

  Except, here he was, about to say goodbye to the strongest woman he knew and it felt like someone had thrown acid down his throat.

  “Ziya—" Jesus, was his voice really that rusty?

  ~~~~~

  Ziya watched him silently.

  His eyes were in shade, but even if they hadn’t been, she couldn’t have said a thing as to how he was feeling; if he was feeling anything. Krivi was the proverbial closed book, and she was tired of trying to read him.

  She gave him a polite smile and prayed for the strength to get through this last goodbye quickly.

  It wouldn’t kill her. She already knew that.

  She’d survived Noor and Sam’s death. She could survive Krivi leaving her. She would build a happy, peaceful life here. It wouldn’t be the end of the world as she knew it.

  He wasn’t dead or dying somewhere. Somehow, that hollow consolation would have to sustain her through the long, empty years ahead.

  “Be safe, Krivi. Don’t…don’t do anything stupid.”

  He smiled back too, a slash of white against the even brown of that handsome face.

  His eyes creased too, the merest light of tenderness coming into it.

  “I am known for being smart in anti-espionage circles.”

  “I know that.”

  Her smile slipped at the end, and her lip quivered again, before she firmed it.

  “I would be terribly stupid if I left you, wouldn’t I?”

  Ziya blinked, and two tears rolled down at the gesture.

  “Then again,” he continued, matter-of-factly, his bags hitting the floor with an audible thump as he came forward. “You’re going to let me go. Doesn’t make you all that smart either, does it?”

  “Krivi—"

  She backed into the railing, gasping as the cold metal bit into her skin, through a flimsy layer of cotton.

  Ziya put a hand at her side, to catch herself, so Krivi completely caged her, when he placed his hands on either side of her waist. Curling their fingers together, in a gesture that was natural. Comfortable…needed.

  Ziya closed her eyes and thumped her forehead against his chest.

  Krivi’s heart, and that tight feeling inside of it, settled, calm and even, at the gesture.

  “What are you doing, Krivi?” she muttered against his tee shirt.

  “Being smart, Ziya. I am known for it in…”

  “Anti-espionage circles, I know that.” She jerked her head up to look at him and nearly gasped again.

  She could read his eyes.

  They were open. Honest.

  Loving.

  “Krivi—"

  Her eyes were big, they almost swallowed her face. Silver-bright with that black circle of iris that had always been so beautiful, so unattainable for him.

  �
��Home’s where you are, Ziya,” he said, quietly. “I know you think I don’t know that, but I do.”

  Her eyes filled again, but with a deep breath that brushed their chests together, she willed them back.

  Krivi smiled. His woman was a warrior, all right.

  “I have to do this one last job. And then I’ll come back to you. You have till then to think about if you want me forever.”

  She curled her nails into his palms, tangling their fingers, their fates together.

  “I do. I already know that,” she whispered.

  Her heart thudded in crazy anticipation and delirious joy and inexplicable fear that even he would be taken away from her. Except, how could she ask him to stay? How could she ask him to pick her over duty to the world?

  When there were so many monsters that needed to be hunted?

  “Or…” He trailed.

  “Or?”

  “You could ask me to stay, right now. If you’re sure that I am what you want.” He smiled, a sheepish little smile. “If you can stand looking into these dead eyes for the next fifty years or so.”

  She freed one hand and touched his cheek, then his eyes.

  “They aren’t dead, anymore,” she said, softly. “They live. You live.”

  “Because of you.” He kissed the side of her lips. “For you.” He kissed the underside of her mouth.

  “With you.”

  He promised before he kissed her on waiting, trembling lips that had been waiting for this promise for a long, long time now.

  “I love you, Ziya Maarten. And I’ll love you till kingdom come.”

  She laughed; a watery laugh, and slid her arms around his neck, going on her toes and kissed him back.

  “I’m so glad… I love you too.”

  Behind them, the sun rose over the Kashmir valley, where people went about their business, where death walked amongst the living, and the living went on.

  Because, nothing could defeat death, like life.

  And it was a lesson the two lovers had learned after paying a terrible price.

  It wasn’t happy ever after, but it was life.

  And life mattered.

  THE END