The guy with the chainsaw backed off, and he laughed too; I used the opportunity to talk to him. ‘Please . . .’ I whispered weakly. ‘Please . . . no . . . I’ll talk.’ I let my voice trail off deliberately, pretending to be on the verge of feinting.
‘What?’ the guy asked. ‘What you say?’
‘I’ll . . . talk,’ I spluttered, again so he could barely hear me.
The others kept shouting and jeering, encouraging him to cut an arm off, or a leg, even my dick; but thankfully, the guy with the chainsaw remembered that he actually had a job to do, which meant getting information. He could carve me up at his leisure once I’d given him what he was after.
He let the chainsaw slow down – though didn’t turn it off entirely – and grunted at his compadres to keep quiet.
‘Say again,’ he instructed with a jut of his chin, and I repeated the same words, as quietly as I could.
‘You better speak up homes, or else I’ll take your fuckin’ foot clean off,’ he growled, and I could tell from his eyes that he was serious; he even let the blades come down near to my bound feet. Tied together, if he took one, the other would probably come right off with it; not a pleasant thought.
I’d been trying to sucker him in, to bring his ear close so I could bite down onto it; and if his ear hadn’t been close enough, then his nose or his cheek would have done just as well. But – brought up as he undoubtedly had been in a maelstrom of gang violence – he was too street-smart to commit himself fully, and kept his distance.
Clever guy.
But necessity is the mother of invention, and so I did what I always did when my initial plan didn’t work – I improvised.
I shifted violently forward on my butt, taking my feet further toward the man, underneath his arms now rather than the chainsaw, and kicked violently upward, my bare feet making contact with those arms, pushing myself off the floor for added leverage.
It worked even better than I’d hoped, the chainsaw looping up back toward the big man and burying itself in his head; his entire body shook with the vibrations as the teeth of the saw rotated viciously into his skull, blood and brains flying everywhere.
I was on my feet in an instant, shoulder barging the dead man backward into his nearest colleague before anyone could react. I dropped to the floor in the stunned silence that followed, kicking the still live chainsaw across the floor toward the other men. They panicked, skip-stepping out of the way like prima ballerinas, and I used the opportunity to pull my bound arms around my ass, followed by feet and bent knees until I had my hands to my front – far more useful for getting out of this hellhole in one piece.
My ankles were still bound, but I didn’t have any time to do anything about that right then; they rest of the gangbangers had finally come to their senses and were flying into action. Two of them came directly for me, while the other two ran for the table of tools; I saw one of them pick up a machete and an icepick, while the other chose a vicious-looking little hatchet.
The first guy was on me and – still prone on the floor – I lashed out with both feet aimed at his leading knee. The blow was hard and I heard the cartilage snap, but he remained standing and so I kicked upward into his balls and he dropped to his knees. I flew at him, burying my teeth into his nose, whipping it from side to side until the tip came off and the man’s screams filled the large space, echoing off the metal walls and reverberating round that horrific slaughterhouse like those of the man’s own previous victims. Justice was sweet.
I turned then as the second unarmed man reached me, and I spit the tip of his friend’s nose into his face; he couldn’t help but react, his hands going up to deflect the bloody flesh which flew toward him, his eyes wide in horror. I used the opportunity to make a grab for his leg, pulling it out from under him, and an instant later I was crawling on top of his body, bound hands reaching out for his face, kneeing him in the balls as I went. He convulsed in pain and my hands found his wet, greasy hair a moment later, my fingers entwining within it, using it to control his head as I picked it up and slammed it back into the concrete again and again and again, until blood started to spread out from his skull like a halo.
The other two were almost on me by then, and I knew their blades would be cutting through me in seconds if I didn’t move; but my subconscious had already planned my next move for me, and I found myself rolling off the body, scooping up the active chainsaw as I went, controlling it with my two hands, still bound together.
The first man was right there behind me, unable to stop, and I jumped and span – unable to turn effectively with my ankles still tied together – and dropped low at the same time, going to my knees facing the man who was whipping the hatchet through the air toward where my head had just been only moments before.
I used my spin to drive across with the chainsaw, and as it contacted the man’s stomach, it went wild in my hands, digging into his flesh and wrestling itself out of my grasp completely; blood spurted into my face and I saw the grey, sausage-like loops of his intestines spilling out of his eviscerated guts onto the hot concrete floor in front of me.
The second armed man was already on me, and I pushed up back to my feet, intercepting his right arm as it descended toward me with the machete; I stopped the blow, but both my hands were tied up while he still had his ice pick free.
In the next instant, the ice pick was whistling in toward my throat, and I did the only thing I could and pulled my arms across to defend the second attack; the machete passed by me, but the ice pick went straight through my right forearm, the pain blinding in its intensity. I saw the tip of the pick emerge on the other side, and I knew it had gone straight through flesh but perhaps missed the bone; and then instinct kicked in and I turned my body in a tight arc, wrenching the handle of the pick out of the man’s grip with my movement, continuing the turn as he was still figuring out what I was doing.
And then I was round, full circle, unleashing my bound arms toward him until I buried his own ice pick – still sticking out of my forearm – right into the side of his thick neck, his eyes going wide with shock and pain. He fell to his knees, dragging me painfully down by my forearm with him, and I pulled back with my arms to stop the pain, ripping the pick out of his neck and sending a geyser of arterial blood spraying across the room in front of me.
I looked around to survey the carnage; it wasn’t a pretty sight. But then again, the room had been used for this sort of thing before, and the dead men represented just five more bodies for the pitiless slaughterhouse floor.
Better them than me.
I half-waddled, half-hopped, across the floor to the table of torture tools, close to passing out from the pain in my forearm. But I ignored it as best I could and selected a rough saw from the table, gripping it with my teeth and – holding it against the table for resistance – I held up my arms and quickly sawed through the ropes which bound my wrists.
Hands free, I went to work on my ankles and quickly freed my legs. I then stood up straight and walked over to one of the dead gangbangers. I pulled the bandana from his head and put it in my mouth, then pulled the icepick from my arm, biting down on the material to stop me from screaming in pain. From the lack of external intervention during the fight, I assumed we were alone here, but the rag was more for my own pride – I didn’t like to hear myself scream any more than I absolutely had to.
The blood ran freely down my arm to my wrist and hand and – trying to ignore the icy pain which seemed to run through my entire body – I secured the bandana around the wound and wrapped it tight in a makeshift bandage.
I looked again at the men to see if any of them were alive to answer questions and saw movement from the man whose head I’d rammed into the concrete floor. I approached him, saw it was the guy who’d hurt his knuckles on my teeth. Blood surrounded his head, but his eyes were flickering, his lips moving slightly. A low moan escaped his mouth. He was a mess, but he was alive. Damn, the guy must have had a skull made out of granite.
I breathed out slowly, c
ollecting myself.
These people weren’t Santiago’s, I knew that much – he was a lowdown player, a nobody; this set-up was for professional cartel business.
I needed answers.
And this guy was going to give them to me.
Part Three
Chapter One
I sipped on an espresso, relaxing into the wicker chair out on the café’s outdoor patio as I watched the blood-red sun slowly starting its descent over the horizon.
Half the city was probably looking for me by now, with murder on their mind; but after getting out of that little jam earlier in the day, I felt I’d earned a bit of relaxation time.
I’d bought a med kit from a local pharmacy and fixed my arm up, but it was still painful and I’d struggle to fire a gun with my right hand for a while. In fact, gripping anything was going to be difficult. Not impossible though, I consoled myself; not impossible.
My ribs were sore from the beating they’d given me, but I didn’t think anything was broken. My piss didn’t have any blood in it either, so my kidneys must have come through relatively unscathed too.
There was a huge welt on the back of my head from where I’d been knocked out by the cop’s nightstick, but it was covered by my hair at least, which was more than could be said for my face. I had nice purple bruises under my eyes, my nose was broken, and one of the guys had knocked a crown out. My jaw and cheekbones had held up okay though.
My nose had been spread halfway across my face, but I’d managed to straighten it back myself, so it now bore at least some semblance to a straight line. The cartilage was bust up pretty good though, and it made breathing more difficult than it should have been.
The pain itself didn’t bother me; it was nothing compared to what had happened years earlier, in another life.
Another world.
My thoughts drifted back there now, the dry heat of the day so similar to Iraq. I tried to fight the memories away, but couldn’t; they were too strong.
I’d been in the Rangers for nine years when it happened, the youngest solider to ever make it into the Regimental Recon Detachment – the top unit in an already elite regiment. Not bad for a poor boy from Rock Springs, Wyoming. But then again, maybe my early years in the great outdoors helped – it was a good introduction to working in the field on operations, it put me in tune with nature and exposed me to the necessity of a strong survival mentality from a young age.
That period of my life, while undoubtedly useful, didn’t last long though – my parents were both killed in a car crash before I was seven. I was taken in by my grandparents on my mother’s side, and life couldn’t have been more different; from a smallholding in Wyoming – poor perhaps, but with the vast plains as my playground – to a rundown apartment in downtown Denver.
Life there was a different kind of hard, and I soon found that surviving in a city was a whole other ball game. My school wasn’t great, and there was a lot of pressure to run with the local gangs. I got into some trouble but – to my grandparents’ credit – they didn’t stand for my behavior at all and went to work overtime on instilling the basic concepts of morality and ethics into my young mind. My grandfather introduced me to boxing too, which was a great way of working off my excess aggression.
I owed them both a lot, and it was a crushing blow when they died. It was my grandfather first, from a heart attack as he was returning from the local grocery store; then my grandmother years later, from cancer. I was halfway around the world on both occasions, fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the deserts, caves and mountains of foreign lands.
I would have liked to be there for them, but it was the life I had chosen. I was sure they would have understood. Indeed it was my grandfather – himself a veteran of not only World War II but also the Korean War – who had been the one to suggest enlisting in the first place. He could see how the life would suit me, would channel my energies into something useful and positive. I wondered sometimes whether he’d been right or wrong about that.
I’d joined the Rangers at the age of seventeen and – unlike most of my intake – I enjoyed the tough, relentless training. Navigation, survival, advanced weapon handling, close combat with knives and bare hands, mountaineering, parachuting, rappelling, fieldcraft and fitness – I loved it all. I passed out as a full-fledged member of the 75th Ranger Regiment not long after my eighteenth birthday and I remember the pride in my grandparents’ eyes as they watched the parade, marveling at how their young boy had become a man.
Nearly eight years later, I was something else again – a killer.
I was authorized by my government, sure, but that’s what I was, and I was damned good at it too. The morality of it never bothered me unduly – I had my orders, and I carried them out. It was always them or me, and I made sure it was never me. It was survival, pure and simple.
My mind took me, unbidden, back to the days following New Year, 2004; when pain became a far bigger part of my life than I ever could have imagined.
As part of the Regimental Recon Detachment, I’d been situated as part of a four-man team high up on a hill overlooking a small, walled village a few clicks to the west of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city after Baghdad.
Intelligence assets had hinted that the village was the home of Abdul-Zahir El-Baz, a bomb-maker whose IEDs had taken out more than their fair share of US troops. More than their fair share of civilians too. He was a highly wanted man, and rightly so.
Me and my team had been observing the village day and night for the past three weeks, and we’d come to several conclusions. The first was the fact that El-Baz was indeed located within the village; the second was that his bomb-making factory was also there. Additional to these expected findings though, we had also ascertained that the otherwise unremarkable village was also a major transit point for al-Qaeda troops and some of its low-level leadership.
We’d watched and made our notes, compiling detailed intelligence reports about the target village which we’d been regularly sending back to 3rd Battalion HQ. As lead scout, I’d even been down to the village myself in the dead of night – covered by the team sniper – and placed listening devices within some of the key target houses.
It was these devices which had decided the date of the main Ranger strike mission; for translators had informed our own leaders that a major meeting was scheduled. Plenty of targets would be in the same vicinity, and it would be an opportunity too good to miss.
And so it came to be – at oh-dark-hundred, the lightning strike from Delta Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, began.
It was supposed to be quick, precise, surgical.
Instead, it quickly turned into one big cluster-fuck.
Al-Qaeda were there, ready and waiting for us with the big guns out; Delta Company started to sustain heavy losses almost as soon as their Black Hawk’s dropped them off inside the village walls. We heard their calls for help over the radio net; heard the gunfire and the screams.
My three colleagues and I had no idea what was going on; how had the enemy known? Our remit was to provide recon, not to get involved ourselves; we were merely observers.
But my friends and I watched the carnage below us, and we all nodded in understanding.
Fuck the rules.
We were going in.
We left Ryan Janes on sniper duties as I raced down the hill with Billy Zito and Tom Cooper to join the combat.
We knew the layout of the streets, the disposition of the buildings, better than we knew our home towns – for more than twenty days, our attention had been rooted on the little walled village.
Through the foggy green haze of our night vision goggles, we tore into the village through a storm drain that ran through an opening in the wall. Our Colt M4A1 carbines up and at the ready, we followed a predetermined route through a maze of alleyways until, at last, we reached the central village square and emerged right into a scene from a horror movie.
There were four wounded soldiers lying in the square – an
urban box fifty yards by fifty yards, hemmed in on all sides by rough stone and concrete buildings – and a section of Rangers were sheltering to one side, grabbing whatever cover they could as they got pinned down by enemy fire from the other side. We knew that similar scenes were being played out elsewhere throughout the village, could hear the chatter of AK47s, the controlled bursts of M4s in reply. Mortar fire. Grenades. Rockets. Screams.
Everything had gone to hell in a breadbasket, and all we could do was wade in and hope for the best. There was sniper fire coming from a tall building to the right, and I called in the details to Janes who – from faraway on the hill – immediately started taking shots at the suspected window. Under the conditions, it was unlikely he would hit anything, but it quietened things down for the few moments we needed.
I got on the comms link to Delta Company, gave them the brief on what we were doing; then, just to be sure, I shouted instructions to the section of men holed up in the far corner.
‘Cover us!’ I yelled, and – despite their own predicament – I was pleased to see they responded immediately and opened up with all guns blazing.
Under the hail of gunfire, the three of us raced out from the alleyway, getting to the center of the square in world championship time. Zito and Cooper got their free hands on one soldier each, still firing back single handed with their M4s.
As they dragged the men back across the open ground, rounds from the enemy landing all around them despite the best efforts of the Delta section, I slung my own rifle behind me and grabbed both remaining men, a hand on each of their collars.
I dragged them backwards, blood smearing over the ground, appearing as a black sludge through the goggles. I heard a cry to my left, saw that Zito had been hit, right through the chest; he was on the floor next to the soldier he’d been hauling, gasping for breath. I couldn’t be sure if he’d taken it in the vest, had no idea if he would live; but I was relieved to see other men leaving the safety of cover, grabbing Zito and the other guy and pulling them back to safety.
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN: Introducing Colt Ryder - One Man, One Mission, No Rules Page 8
