by Ty Patterson
Zeb introduced himself, watched him move in the room, confidently, surely, despite his age and appearance. ‘Thank you, Sir. If you hadn’t taken me in, I reckon I would have needed more than a dressing.’
Eastman clicked his tongue and shook his head. ‘Nothing’s really wrong with you, son. That sticker went in and out, didn’t do much other than poking a hole into you. I reckon the dude didn’t know what he was doing.’
‘He knew just what he was doing.’ Zeb corrected him grimly.
Eastman handed him a wet towel to wipe his face. ‘Is that so? Well, doesn’t look like he’ll be using that anymore.’ His teeth flashed briefly, revealing the gaps in them. The few teeth he had were strong and white.
Zeb tested his legs, they felt fine. He rose and sat on the bed; his shoulder twinged sharply and settled down into a persistent burn. He tried his arm and found he could use it. He shrugged mentally. Eastman’s right. It was just exhaustion and shock. The knife wound doesn’t matter. I’ve been injured worse.
A hand appeared in front of him bearing a mug from which came the distinctive smell of coffee. Zeb took a cautious sip and closed his eyes when the beverage rolled through him, bringing him back to life.
‘You seem to be used to this, Sir.’
Bwana and Roger traded a laugh. ‘You got lucky, Zeb, when Mr. Eastman came across you.’ The Texan’s grin lit the room. ‘Of all the people who could have picked you up, he was the one you needed.’
Zeb remembered the objects dangling in Eastman’s truck. ‘You were in the military, Sir?’
The grin became a chortle. ‘Mr. Eastman is a ‘Nam vet. He was an army medic.’
Zeb looked in the green eyes and his eyes saw all that Eastman had seen. The old man waved away Zeb’s thanks and led him to the next room where he had laid out four places on a wooden table. He ladled out stew in four bowls and gestured at them to sit.
Zeb felt the vibration first; an intangible change in the way molecules in air throbbed and moved. He used both hands to hurl the table on its side, so that it faced away from them and kicked it toward the entrance.
A wide sweep of his arm brought down Eastman and the Glock was already snug in his hand when two masked men surged through the dining room. His gun spoke twice, then Bwana’s and Roger’s joined in and the men fell.
Zeb dragged Eastman back into a narrow utility room as shadows flitted around the house, a radio crackled on one of the dead man’s body and yells broke out from the outside.
Bwana and Roger brought up the rear, covering them, but no other men appeared.
They’ll take us outside; it’ll be easier.
The utility room was small and crammed with shelving on which lined cans of food, gasoline, flashlights, batteries, coils of rope, an axe, and hunting knives. There were folded blankets neatly folded on a top of a barrel and cans of paint were arranged on the floor. The room had no windows and its sole entrance was to the dining room.
A barrage of shots sounded, aimed at the dining room, but Eastman had built the cabin with care, with logs as thick as a grown man’s width, and the bullets died inside the walls.
Bwana looked at Zeb silently, no words needed to be spoken. They were safe for now, but they didn’t know how large the bunch of attackers was. They would be cut down if they stepped outside.
‘Not quite. We aren’t dead yet.’ Eastman read their glances and chuckled surprisingly. He went to the barrel that was full of gas, ‘for the generator,’ the old man explained, and tried to move it away. Bwana and Roger rushed to help him and moved the barrel as if it was empty.
Eastman bent over the floor and blew dust away revealing a circular trap door with a rope through its center. He tugged at the rope, opened the door, thrust an arm through the darkness and turned on a light.
They followed him down a ladder, Zeb, who was bringing up the rear, closed the trap door behind him and locked it with a dead bolt. The steps went down twelve feet and widened into a narrow hollow under the ground.
Concrete all around. Well lighted. A draft of air. He’s spent a lot of time digging and building this tunnel.
‘I aged ten years in Cu Chi.’ Eastman cracked a smile when he saw the recognition in Zeb’s crew.
Cu Chi in Vietnam was where the Viet Cong had built an extensive network of tunnels to counter the better-equipped American and South Vietnamese forces. It was from this underground maze that they mounted attacks on their enemy.
‘I was attached to tunnel rats and went down a few times myself. I wanted an escape route when I was building this cabin.’ He waved his hands to encompass the narrow passage. ‘Took me close to a year.’
He turned and gestured at them to follow him. ‘This opens into a dry well that is camouflaged. It is a hundred yards away from the cabin and I am betting whoever these dudes are, they haven’t discovered it.’
Eastman was right. The well, ten feet deep, had bricks built into it as steps. Zeb peered up and all he could see was a canopy of foliage through which patches of blue shone. He reached out silently and Roger placed a cable camera in his hand. His Glock between his teeth, he climbed swiftly, peered through and signaled clear.
The well opening was surrounded by thick trees, and in their cover, Eastman drew the directions to his cabin and its layout of his cabin on the ground. He watched as the three men with him acknowledged unspoken commands.
‘What about me?’ He whispered. ‘That was my home those men crashed into.’
Roger gave him a spare Glock. ‘You can use this, Sir?’
The old man gave him a withering stare. ‘Son, I was firing guns when you were still sucking milk.’
Bwana chuckled at the put down. ‘Sir, please stay here, and take out any hoods that approach. They might discover the tunnel and if they come out here, you know what to do. We’ll deal with the rest.’
He took the left, Roger the right, Zeb would go on the roof and counterattack from the top. Roger handed out bone phones to the four of them and the three melted away.
Zeb moved from tree to tree, rolling his feet on the ground, spreading his weight, listening. He could hear sounds in the distance, shouts and then silence. Fifteen minutes had elapsed since the attack. Enough time for them to check out the cabin and discover that it was empty.
‘They might circle round and spread out in a search pattern.’ Bwana and Roger clicked in acknowledgement.
Twenty feet away he came across the first search party. Two shadows drifted through the growth, five feet from each other, using the barrels of their AKs to part the woods for them.
He waited for them to approach and when the first man passed him, he ghosted behind him, one arm going over the hood’s face, another on his neck. The hood collapsed but his partner glanced up, turned, raised his AK, and opened his mouth to yell a warning.
Zeb shot him. A double tap from the silenced Glock that the woods ate. He waited but heard no shouts of alarm.
‘Two more down,’ he whispered.
‘Make that three.’ Bwana chuckled.
‘Four,’ Roger was laconic.
The fifth man took Zeb by surprise. He rose suddenly from the ground, less than five feet away, his finger already on the trigger, barrel swinging in a short arc to cover Zeb, his mouth widening into a triumphant grin behind his mask.
Zeb left the ground in a low dive, came under the rising barrel and knocked it up and away. The shots sailed harmlessly in the air and his Benchmade sank deep into the hard case. Zeb ducked under his flailing hands and kicked his feet from underneath.
‘How many of you?’
‘Ten,’ the man gasped without resistance.
Now three left.
The rear of the cabin became visible and after watching it for a while, he drifted to the left, past the dining room, the small living room and when he approached the front, he stepped out from the cover of the woods.
Bwana was leaning against a trunk, puffing on a cigar, while Roger skimmed through a collection of small arms and phones
. He looked up at Zeb’s approach.
‘All throw away phones. I questioned one badass and he said they belonged to a gang in Boston. Their leader is over there.’ He pointed to a man who lay bound and trussed against the cabin.
Half an hour later, they had some answers. Flames, the gang leader, worked in a larger gang. His boss had given him the contract to take out the old man and his companions.
Did he know why?
He spat out blood. Flames took out men and women. He didn’t ask why.
Zeb questioned him some more and gave up when he got nothing productive.
Bwana asked the gangster a question. ‘Why, Flames?’
‘Because I burn people,’ the hood replied proudly. They were the last words he uttered for a while. Bwana knocked him out cold and taped his mouth and tossed him like a rag doll against the cabin.
Zeb requested Eastman to make the call and the first cruiser appeared twenty minutes later. The cops who emerged from it looked shocked when they went through the house and at the bodies.
‘Just who are you guys?’ one of them asked.
Roger chewed on a blade of grass and the faintest trace of a smile swept his face. ‘Just some dudes who don’t like our lunch interrupted.’
They were released late evening after a hands-off message poured down the line following a series of calls. Eastman was well liked and respected and his story corroborated Zeb’s and he too was released. Zeb and his team stayed the night with Eastman and the next day they helped him mend the broken windows and fill the holes in the walls.
‘Guy at my age; fishing is all I have for excitement.’ His eyes sparkled when they were loading their SUV after they had finished. ‘Visit again and often if all this accompanies you.’
Bwana drove them to Boston and when they had left the reservation behind, he asked Zeb, ‘You know who those hoods were?’
‘A Slovenian gang, originally from New York but now spreading their reach to other cities on the Eastern seaboard.’
Bwana clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘Yeah, I heard the cops. How did they find us though?’
‘Wasserman was probably tracking one of the phones of his three men. I had forgotten all about them when I didn’t get a signal. Once he knew where we were, he must have called in a few favors.’
Roger shifted in the back and growled. ‘We need to pay him a visit.’
Wasserman finally found out that Studelander was dead by a method so simple that he wondered why it hadn’t come to him earlier.
Both, he and Studelander, wore electronic tags that were sold widely as fitness and activity monitoring devices. The wristbands fed data to the user’s smartphone which in turn relayed the information to a cloud-based application. Wasserman had access to Studelander’s application and when the device showed no recent information, he knew his second-in-command was dead.
By then the GPS signals from Boxer’s and Pock Mark’s phone had come back online and those gave him an idea.
He called Fadil Stinek once he had triangulated the phones’ location in the Blue Hills Reservation and asked him to send good men.
Stinek, a vicious criminal, had a tight grip on the south side of Boston where his drugs and prostitution business flourished. He had established himself in New York, but when crime didn’t pay as much as it used to in that city, he had moved to Boston.
Wasserman knew Stinek would do the job. The Slovenian would sell his mother for the right price, or slit her throat.
Stinek didn’t care about subtlety; he killed brutally and often in public. A year back, one of his men had gunned down a businessman in a well-populated café in New York and had then drunk the man’s beverage and walked out calmly.
On another occasion, Stinek himself had slit the throat of a woman in broad daylight with numerous onlookers. His men went to prison, many of them were gunned down by cops, but Stinek remained untouched and his business empire grew.
He turned his attention back to Carter once he had made the arrangements. I had twenty good men. Now I am down to twelve. We should have left Carter alone in Pinedale.
He threw a sheaf of papers into the fire and watched them turn orange, then red and then black and grey and ash. Leaving Carter alone wouldn’t have changed anything. He started hunting the moment he discovered Petrova’s body.
Wasserman was in batten-down mode. He was readying himself for a showdown with Carter, who he knew would come. He knew the kind of man Carter was. He was relentless in his pursuit and he would know Wasserman was the only one who knew how the pieces fit together.
He has four men and three women in New York. Eight of them in total if his entire crew joins him.
Eight against thirteen. His lips spread back in a silent snarl.
Those are good odds. He doesn’t know the kind of man I am. In any case, he has to survive the Slovenians.
The thought came to Zeb when he was half asleep, lulled by the hiss of tires on black top, secure in the knowledge that the two men with him would obliterate any further attack.
The thought gnawed away at his sleep and when he woke up, he fired a text to Meghan.
Send Wasserman’s voice print to friendly agencies around the world. Werner had run the print against all the national and international databases it had access to, but what if a match was lying elsewhere? The twins had queried intelligence organizations in other countries and got nothing back. But they hadn’t sent out the voice print.
Meghan looked at the text, silently smacked her forehead in reproach. I should have thought of that. She sent the file to forty intelligence forces around the world and went back to studying Petrova’s activities.
The journalist’s letter to Balthazar still had them stumped and she was now down to going through Petrova’s life day by day for as far back as Werner could get information on.
Petrova was a voracious reader and was a regular visitor to the Laramie County Library in Cheyenne and she also ordered books off various online retailers. Meghan had keyed in all her borrows and purchases into Werner, but no code was apparent. She was now poring over a list of borrows that went three years back and it was the books at the bottom of the list that had her frowning.
Aramaic texts translated to English? She tapped her teeth with her a nail and ran further searches. The ancient language used the Phoenician alphabet and several Middle Eastern languages could be traced back to it.
The books Petrova had borrowed were all religious texts.
But she wasn’t religious. She was Jewish, but a non-practicing one from all accounts and disliked all religions.
She looked up the books and fist pumped silently while her twin gawped at her. Yes, the books Petrova had borrowed were available in ebook format in the original script.
She purchased the books and uploaded them to Werner’s database and wrote a command.
Werner acknowledged, dusted off its bits and bytes and got to work.
Bwana was in no particular hurry and drove at a steady pace through a near empty road while his friends rested beside him. He cast a glance behind at Roger and got a slow wink from him. A surge of warmth spread through him and he responded with a silent thumbs up.
Roger never spoke of where he came from, but they all knew he was an orphan and had been reared by a foster family who hadn’t exactly showered him with love. Roger had done the family a favor when he had run away at seventeen, had faked parental permission and had joined the Army.
We are his family now just as we are Zeb’s and they are mine.
A pair of lights flashed and caught his attention. Bikes. Two of them. Nope, six. He eased to the right making room for them to pass.
They didn’t and he then woke Zeb.
Chapter 24
Zeb twisted to look behind; the bikes were approaching faster and were spread wide to cut out any overtaking traffic.
‘You sure they’re after us?’
‘Yeah. I made a few false turns, but they stuck to us like limpets.’
‘What
are they waiting for?’ Roger asked impatiently as he opened a board under the rear seat and removed a modified SR-25 sniper rifle that had full auto mode. He slapped a mini-computer on top of it, one that would give self-aiming capabilities and handed the equipment to Zeb. The three of them donned their Kevlar jackets in silence, Roger assisting Bwana with his. ‘Want me to take the wheel?’ he asked Bwana knowing the black man loved the long gun.
‘Nah, Zeb can handle it. Besides we may not get to use it; the ride’s too choppy.’ His voice rose to a shout. ‘Here they come.’
The first round embedded in the thick rear glass and a white galaxy blossomed around it. More shots followed and soon the rear was riddled with bullet marks.
One of the lead riders waved his arm and pointed at the wheels; guns flashed, but all the shots went wide. It was hard enough taking a shot at a moving target. It was practically impossible to shoot the tires off when atop a fast bike.
‘Those are self-inflating, run-flat babies. Those dumb asses can shoot all day if they want.’ Bwana chortled. ‘Whoa, looks like they’ve got another plan.’
Two riders came up fast, flanked his sides and made to overtake him.
One rider looked briefly at Bwana, his helmeted face caught the sun and then it snapped round straight quickly. But it wasn’t fast enough.
The momentary distraction gave Bwana the opening he wanted; he swerved to the right, tires squealing, and the rider went flying in the air when the heavy SUV crashed into the Yamaha.
The second rider went ahead, turned in his seat and rained shots at the windscreen. Many of them sailed harmlessly but a few embedded in the armored glass and spread. Zeb lowered his window an inch, thrust his Glock out and fired continuously in a roll of thunder, making the rider speed away.
