“Sam. You have acquired one of the holy grails of all blade collectors, and you’ve chosen to give it to me as a gift. The only thing I can say is that I thank you with all my heart. I’ll always treat it with respect, and it will never leave my family, from this moment on.” I did the two-handed slip into the scabbard, turned around and picked my jacket off of the hook on the wall where Sam had put it. With the jacket back on, it wasn’t any more visible than the guns. Less so, actually. I leaned across the table and took the liberty of pouring both Sam and I a fresh glass of the kirsch. Godsen covered her glass with her hand again, maybe not liking the taste. I picked up Sam’s glass and handed it to him, holding my own at the same time. Then I gave Sam a toast.
“To the one man and his family, that have stayed true to me as if you were my own. To Samuel and Samira Kleinemann, my family.” I raised my glass high then threw it down my throat.
~
Chapter Eighteen
S am didn’t drink the toast, which meant he had something serious on his mind. Sam almost never talked this way, either. When Sam showed his emotions, it was an occasion of great import, or Samira had let him have too much kirsch. I knew for a fact that he could drink me under the table, and I only had a small buzz, so it wasn’t the kirsch talking.
“Jeffry… my son. May I speak to you in these personal ways in front of this lovely lady you’ve brought with you today?” I was backed into a bit of a corner there. I would have preferred privacy; I knew that as soon as he had called me his son. His first-born son had died on the day I met Sam, and in his mind, there was a link there that couldn’t be broken. Letting Godsen in on some of my real history wouldn’t give her leverage on me, but maybe it would help her get to know me in a way I couldn’t say. Maybe it would be alright.
“Yes, Sam. She’s one of the good guys. We’re in the process of doing her Field Certification.” I glanced over at her, just in time to catch a glare. That was a new one, more for say, an equal than a subordinate. Aha. One step at a time. When we’d met, about sometime yesterday, I’d been nothing more than another pawn in her game of chess with the opposition. Since we’d met the opposition, I’d come up a few notches, and I think she’d taken a shine to Sam, which wasn’t hard, and that had given me additional veracity.
Sam was a good man with a good family. All of his remaining five kids had made proper lives for themselves, two of them, Aram, and Ibrahim, had elected to stay with their father’s work. They studied hard and they worked hard. Both of them traded off on international trips of acquisition and tending the shop here at home. Four of the five were married, and I’m sure Sam had many grandchildren these days. None of them knew what Sam had been through after the war. Who he had worked for. What kind of work he had done. That had been hard, but he had managed it, all the better for them.
I decided to give some credence to my traveling partner.
“She’s also a very wise woman, a fact which has been acknowledged by my government, at a fairly high level.” Maybe that would make up for the glare.
“Ah. I see. Well let me tell you what I have to say then.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “This blade, even with the minor restorations done to the handle and the scabbard, is worth a small fortune. To the right collector. I give this to you freely as I would to one of my own sons. I hope that you get to place it inside your glass display case without having to use it on the way home. These people that you’re after, Jeffry. If Bruno can’t get to them, you shouldn’t even be trying. Take good care.” He still hesitated a bit, then forged ahead. The next words weren’t easy for him to say, and a few got stuck in his throat as he spoke.
“I may not be here to greet you the next time you come to see me, Jeffry. I don’t get younger each time the sun sets, and I feel my path coming to an end.” He held up his hand to forestall any protests I might make. “There is no way I can ever repay you for what you’ve done for my family. On this there is no debate.” I kept my mouth shut. “There is an account in town here. At the Bundesbank. It is a nice Swiss numbered account. In my Will, I have provided well for all of my family, they will not need to work anymore unless they choose to. Which I’m sure they will. Everybody hates just sitting around with nothing to do.” He smiled to himself at his own home-grown philosophy. “That numbered account is for you. It would have been Yousef’s share.” Yousef. I should have seen this coming.
“Over the years I’ve put a goodly sum in that account, and now that fate has delivered you to my door, you don’t have to find out from a lawyer, about this… thing. I have the privilege of telling you myself, and giving it to you myself.” He pulled an envelope out of his inside pocket. It was a fat one. “The bankbook is here, along with the access code. Please take this in the spirit that it is intended, without denial, Jeffry. Please.” There was look that passed between us that took us both back to that first day we’d met, in Yemen. So far ago. So long away.
He’d been working for the British, while running a small knife shop as a cover. It was surprising who came into his shop for the best knives in the country. That cover had been used as just one of many bargaining chips in a three-way brokered deal. The Yemenis and the British were trying to stop the escalating civil war. The Americans were the brokers, and I’d known nothing about it until our team was back in Yemen again, and we made contact with Sam. He was in the process of watching his family being killed in front of him before being taken to the secret police headquarters for a final tallying. Somehow, his cover had blown. Our C.O. on the mission had wanted us to pull out fast, as we were outnumbered by about three to one. There were four men in our team.
I did a straw poll and found that it was a deadlock. Two for two. I’d been monitoring the house from behind a small mound in the back yard. It was probably being prepared for flower planting. With my night scope I could see very clearly through the open back door. Sam was on one side of the room, and the rest of his family were bunched together on the other side of the room. It was a sort of home workshop room tacked onto the back of the main building. There were three Yemeni soldiers lounging around the back door, smoking and cradling their Kalashnikov AK 47s in their arms as they milled about, talking low and laughing occasionally. They were exactly fifteen meters from us, and we were being very low profile.
Inside there was an officer of some kind. Secret Police, I’m sure. They learned that one from the Russians. With him were about four or five more soldiers, it was hard to tell. Two of them kept wandering in and out of my field of vision, maybe through the door to the rest of the house. We knew that there was a jeep and a troop truck parked out front. Both with drivers at the ready, and three more soldiers with AK 47’s milling around the front gate to the house.
Virtually, all houses in the Middle East had solid concrete walls about eight to twelve feet high surrounding the grounds of the house. We’d driven by in the front about ten minutes earlier in our transportation. An old beat-up yellow Toyota taxi. Two of us had kept our heads down in the back, Roger and Nigel. I’d sat up front in my flowing white robe and red-checkered headdress, my gutra. Just a Saudi National visiting the town. The C.O. had been similarly outfitted with a local Yemeni outfit. His was easier to move around in though.
The Yemenis have been the subject of much derision, usually from Westerners who don’t know the difference between a Newfoundland dog and a black bear on a sunny day at five paces. They wear kilts. As did my ancestors, and even now, for ceremonial occasions, I still have my Grandfather’s Kilt and Sporran.
The westerner’s called them ‘skirts’. I’ve never seen anyone calls a Scottish or Irish man a wearer of ‘skirts’. During the Second World War, the Black Watch Divisions from the Canadian Forces had more enemies surrendered more quickly than any other group within the entire Allied ranks. The Black Watch wore Kilts and used a Piper when they went into battle. They weren’t big on prisoners though. If you fought against them, you killed them all or you were all killed. No half measures. Usually. After a
bout a year of this type of action, the enemy started jumping out of foxholes, weaponless, with their hands in the air as soon as it had been determined that the Black Watch were attacking. It was a phenomenon that didn’t get much airplay because of the way they’d managed to get that kind of reputation.
War is hell, it was once said, and truer words were never spoken. When you’re in Hell, there ain’t no rules. That was the unspoken motto of the Black Watch. They had orders to advance. Dragging prisoners around slowed down an advance. They were constantly giving their prisoners away to one or other of the allied groups who could handle them properly. The Black Watch were far too busy advancing to bother with prisoners. Some called them Heroes. Some called them Barbarians. They were both right.
Now we were spread out in Sam’s back yard. We’d cut back on the next street over and parked under a street lamp that wasn’t working. None of them on that street were, actually, and we had the cover of a cloudy sky as well. It was after midnight, and we had no trouble infiltrating the back grounds of the house. I’d left my thobe and gutra in the back seat of the taxi, dressed now in battle fatigues, I blended into the night with the rest of our guys.
Now there was some yelling going on, and the soldiers around the back door dropped their cigarettes and tried to look soldierly. Something bad was going to happen, and it was going to happen soon. Using hand signals to the other guys spread out in the back yard, I did another poll. This time it was two for, the C.O. against, and one on the fence. It was looking bad for Sam, and we all knew him personally. It was getting harder by the moment.
All of a sudden the yelling stopped, and I went back to my scope. The officer in charge had walked over to the little group huddled together on the other side of the room. Sam’s family. Yousef was the light of Sam’s eye.
He had married late in life, falling totally in love with a girl almost twenty years younger than him, and of a different faith. It had been mutual, and the very next year, Sam’s first born had arrived. They named him Yousef, after his wife’s father. Now Yousef was five years old, and about to die. The officer grabbed Yousef from his mother’s grasp, and pulling out his service revolver, shot Yousef in the head at point blank range.
I was about two thirds of the way to the back door before the echoes of the gunshot started. I was moving fast. As I approached the doorway, two of the three soldiers were looking inside the house, but the third saw me. I could tell by the strange expression on his face, like, ‘Who the hell is this?’ He started to say something, maybe yell, or whatever, but he never got a chance. I felt the ‘zzzip’ of a bullet pass close to my left ear from behind. Then I heard a loud roar as the Colt in my left hand jerked from the blowback. The bullet came out of the barrel riding a cone of smoke and fire, catching him low in the throat, killing him instantly from the way he fell, and so ending any comments he may have been about to make. Then I heard the ‘chuf’ of a silencer. The strange thing was that it was all happening in slow motion. Except for me. I was moving faster than I’d ever moved in my life. I watched as the spray of the exit wound caught the other two in the back, and they started to turn. Slowly, slowly.
I’d covered the remaining distance while the first one was still dropping, but it seemed that I’d been too slow at first, because both soldiers were raising their AK 47’s to my chest, then I was three feet away and I had two Colts in my hands. Both barrels spit fire that almost touched their faces, and they both died the death of their comrade. The sound was like one shot, not two, and it was loud, and I was still moving.
I went in through the open doorway in a roll, and then a spin on my back, carrying all the momentum of my run from the mound to the doorway. I couldn’t understand why everyone was moving so slowly, but it was a thought that was far back in my mind, not up front where the action was. As I spun, I fired. First on the officer, then on the troops, first one side of the room, then the other. The shots came close together. Five in all. Two for the officer and one for each of the three troops in the room. The officer, I shot once in each eye at the same time. I don’t think he even saw me, just the guns. The soldiers I shot once each at the base of the throat. The entire room was dripping with blood and death.
Then I was up and headed through the door into the house proper. The two soldiers that had been left at the front door met me as I made my run through the house, leaping over divans, knocking lamps aside with my body, just barreling through like a bulldozer. They opened a door an instant before I was going to ram it full tilt.
Again, there was a single loud roar, and fire spit out of the barrels of both of my Colts. The two soldiers died instantly, shot through the throat. The force of the .45 slugs knocked them back out of the doorway, and I leapt over them, the way I’d been leaping over the furniture. I kept running.
As I passed under an archway from the previous room I entered the main front room. Finally, I had made it to the front door. There was a Yemeni soldier standing in front of the closed door with his AK 47 aimed right at me. I think it was by chance, because it was a large archway, and I could have come through on either side. I didn’t blink. I didn’t think. I shot him in the throat while he was trying to pull his trigger. He got a few rounds off as he fell backwards against the wall, dropping to the floor, dead. I think it was just accidental, because he was dead before his rifle fired. One of them caught me in the calf muscle of my left leg, which threw me off stride and I tumbled to the right, slamming into the wall hard.
I still wasn’t thinking about anything except the drivers out front. The fact that I was now bleeding like a stuck pig didn’t seem to enter into the equation. I’d lost my momentum, and my element of surprise. I had to rally myself. There were two more out front, and the police couldn’t be far behind. I jumped to my feet and promptly fell down again. That’s when it first struck me that I’d been hit for real. My left leg wasn’t working so good. Then fate intervened. The front door burst open and the two drivers came through, military style. One covering, one moving.
I was partially hidden from sight by a curve in the wall between the front door and the corner I’d slammed into. But the trail of my blood was obvious, they’d know where I was already.
I straightened my body, and with both hands stretched all of the way out in front of me, I rolled into their field of fire. I took out the one at the door first, because he had to be expecting something like this as he covered the room for his partner. I shot him twice. I don’t know why, I just did. Both shots were on target and simultaneous. They almost took his head off. As he died, he fell backwards down the front steps of the house. Having broadcast my location by firing, I kept on rolling. Two more rolls, that was all it took to get the last one in my sights. He saw me at the same time I saw him. I was faster, that’s all. The roar of the Colts inside the enclosed space in the house was deafening. That last guy put several shots into the ceiling as he went over backwards from his crouch. There was the smell of cordite in the air, so thick you could see it as well as smell it.
I had always used hot loads, carrying at least twenty-five percent additional kick for my dum-dum rounds. It worked for me.
All of a sudden there was a big silence. Then Nigel came through the archway I’d just dived through. Nobody shot at him, but he didn’t look very good, there was a small rivulet of blood coming from his head, and dripping down his neck and onto his camouflage shirt. The stain was spreading as I watched him walking over to me. Nigel had been the only other go-ahead vote.
He dropped to his knees when he got to me, and kind of smiled, but it was lop-sided, just one side of his face had been working. He tried talking to me, but it was hard to understand. I got up on my knees too, and grabbed Nigel’s head in both my hands, feeling in the back. Yes. Small caliber head wound. He needed a surgical team, and fast. Only we were far from home that day.
That’s when Sam came in, calling out in Arabic, who is there? I’d gone through the place so fast that he hadn’t recognized me. When I answered in Canadian English,
he rushed over to us. I was starting to shake all over, and once again I’d noticed the blood from my leg. It was bleeding pretty freely by then, and it suddenly occurred to me that I might need a doctor myself. At the same time, it was like everything was returning to normal. I could understand what people were saying, and they were moving more or less normally again.
Then my body really started to shake. I looked at Sam, and the tears running down his cheeks. I grabbed him by the arm. “After, Sam! Not now, after!” Between Sam’s wife and myself, we managed to quickly stop the flow of blood from my leg. Nigel was another matter. He needed a skilled neurosurgeon, and that was that. Samira put a binding on the entrance point of the wound, but we had to get the bullet out soon, or I’d be carrying one more dead back from this so-called mission. I got everyone into the troop truck out front as fast as we could move. Now I was hobbling around like an eighty-year-old. It still didn’t hurt much, and I was thankful for that. I found Roger dead at the back door. From the same kind of wound as Nigel. The C.O. was nowhere in sight.
We got Sam, Samira, and little Arim, just a baby, into the back of the truck with Nigel and Roger. Then Sam and I carried Yousef out and lifted his small body over the tailgate to his mother. I gave Sam and Nigel about five AK 47’s, and then tied the flap down tight at the back of the truck. My last words to them before we drove off with me at the wheel, was to stay low, below the side panels of the truck. I had backed the truck up to the front door for us to load up without too much attention, which showed that my mind wasn’t working well at all. After all that gunfire, surely someone had called the police. Surely.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 41
