Blades of Winter

by G T Almasi

  “One thousand feet. Deploy in three, two, one, now!”

  I yank the handle and hear a gratifying rush of air and fabric as the parachute’s canopy expands. The chute’s harness digs into my armpits and crotch as I suddenly brake from 120 miles per hour to just under 10. This is still fast enough to slam my legs out my ass if I screw up the landing, so I focus all my attention on getting on the ground in one piece. Five seconds later I land on the packed dirt of a big empty lot next to the bus depot. Two running steps followed by two dazzling rolls and I’m on terra firma. I unbuckle my skydiving harness and shuck myself out of the straps. Then I gather the chute into a big bundle in my arms while my feet happily reacquaint themselves with solid ground.

  Trick comms, “Scarlet, someone’s approaching your position from the north. It might be the Greeter.”

  “You can’t tell?” I ask.

  “No, he has to run very dark. The Germans in charge of this province don’t agree with his views about their occupation of his country,” Trick comms back.

  “Is he armed?” I ask as I pull Li’l Bertha out of her holster. She can scan Mr. North Guy herself, but Trick’s instruments give him a good top-down view.

  “Well, yeah,” he comms. “Isn’t everybody?”

  I’m about to make a classic Scarlet-style smart-ass reply when he comms, “Wait a sec. There’s two, no, three of them. All different directions.”

  So much for smart-ass. I tell Trick to find me an exit.

  “Maybe they’re ours?” I comm.

  Unexpectedly, Cyrus comms in. “No, the Greeter would come alone. Solomon, get her the hell out of there.”

  Oh, Christ, and here I am still lugging my stupid parachute. Li’l Bertha’s target sensor displays three amber heat signals in my Eyes-Up display. Amber means she doesn’t know if they’re good guys or bad guys.

  I comm Cyrus while Trick listens in. “Almighty, this is Scarlet. Request permission to engage.” This is a complex situation. These may be Germans, Arabic locals, or anybody. Even I know to secure clearance before starting these fireworks. I expect Cyrus will need to call us back.

  Instead, Cyrus immediately comms, “Permission granted, Scarlet. Fire at will.”

  That was fast. A fresh surge of Madrenaline splashes into the Scarlet Speedball I took before the drop and zoots me up.

  Patrick comms in, “Targets recognized.” Li’l Bertha goes from amber to crimson and gyroscopes onto the closest target, the guy to the north. Trick continues, “Scarlet, exit to the northeast.”

  I perforate Bad Guy North with some standard .30-caliber rounds. His red dot vanishes from my screen. I turn around and backpedal northeast so I can target the other two bozos. The security lights from the bus depot cast long dim shadows across the ground. The light doesn’t reveal much, though, and the glare actually makes the night seem darker.

  Li’l Bertha loads up some small stuff to use as suppression because Bad Guys South and West have turned on their heat blockers. I lay down a fog of .12-caliber pellets as I switch to starlight vision. My aim is rotten because I’m still carrying my partially inflated parachute while I run backward across a pitch-dark semipaved lot. Bad Guy South shadows along to my left while Bad Guy West tries to flank around on my right.

  That’s enough of this nonsense. I throw the chute up in the air and position myself so it floats to the ground between me and Bad Guy West, blocking his view of me. I kneel down and take aim at Bad Guy South. Li’l Bertha senses that my posture is more stable and changes from small-caliber pellets to large-caliber slugs. We blow the top of Bad Guy South’s head off with one shot. Strangely, he falls forward. What’s left of his brains pukes out of the top of his skull as he hits the ground. I’m glad my night vision shows me light and dark but not color.

  Without my chute slowing me down I can really move and maneuver now. Bad Guy West charges and fires his pistol at me. I sidestep his shots as I fly up on him and …

  “Scarlet! Do not—”

  … bash his nose halfway into his skull.

  “—terminate that asset!”

  Bad Guy West flies completely off his feet and lands fifteen feet away from me. He exhales sharply as he lands, but he doesn’t budge after that. It’s like I turned him into wood.

  The drugs have settled in nicely now. I’ve got exactly the right balance, and an alert but peaceful sense of calm settles over me. “Solomon, what did you say?”

  He pauses, then comms, “I was about to remind you of our protocol to interrogate neutralized hostiles.”

  “Neutralized? I must have dodged fifty bullets from this guy.”

  “Nine.”

  “Whatever. If that’s neutralized, then I’m Miss Piggy.”

  Trick pauses again. He’s frustrated now. I’m supposed to use a nonlethal takedown for the final member of a hostile group. I know this in training, but out in the field my excitement gets the better of me. There’s nothing like winning a round of kill or be killed. I try to mollify him.

  “Maybe that first guy is alive,” I comm to Trick. I know he’s not. His motion signal vanished after I plugged him. Lucky shot, actually. I barely saw him. Given the circumstances, I think this has gone pretty well so far.

  Trick still hasn’t spoken. I’m sure he’s holding his glasses in one hand and rubbing his temple with the other.

  “Look, Solomon, pout later, all right? Just get me out of this goddamn area.” I gather my parachute again while he gives me directions and coordinates. I stuff the chute in a big Dumpster behind the bus depot.

  “What about the meatbags?” I comm to Trick.

  “Leave ’em. The Greeter’s guys will take care of them.”

  As I walk past Bad Guy West, I take a good look at him. He’s got a blocky head, pale skin, and an ugly, brutish face. I take his picture and save the image for our files.

  “Solomon, this guy doesn’t look like he’s from around here.” I send him my picture of Bad Guy West.

  “You’re right,” Trick comms back. “More like he’s from KGB central casting.”

  I approach the bus depot from the rear. A streetlight illuminates a road in front. “What’s with all the damned Russians lately?”

  “I wish I knew, but it looks like things are even worse than Chanez thought. These guys knew exactly where you were going to land. If they’d been Germans, I’d say they’d simply gotten lucky with their radar, but I’m not sure what to make of this.”

  “Jesus, Solomon, only three other people know I’m here!” Our pilot tonight knows he dropped someone into Baghdad, but he has no idea who or why. The Greeter knows he’s retrieving someone, but he doesn’t know who or why, either. That leaves Cyrus, Harbaugh, and Director Chanez. Even Cleo doesn’t know where I am.

  Trick comms, “From what just happened, I’d say it’s more than three.”

  “Do you think the leak is inside ExOps?” I hate even to think this, but I add, “Could it be Jacques?”

  “It could be anybody,” Trick replies. “But Jacques has been in this game a long time. He’d do a better job of distancing himself from this sort of thing. I mean, we just saw him.”

  I comm, “True, but he is a little crazy.”

  “I know, Scarlet,” Trick comms quietly. “I’ll keep working on it. Keep your eyes open.”

  I run around to the road in front of the bus depot. Headlights are coming up the street.

  “Solomon, I have a vehicle on approach.”

  “That’s probably the Greeter,” Trick comms back.

  “Roger that,” I comm. “I see flashing lights behind him. Two cars.”

  “Hang on.” I hang on. Trick continues, “That’s the Baghdad police. I’ve got them on my radio scanner. They’re responding to reports of gunshots near the bus depot.”

  “Then why are they chasing our guy?”

  “Oh-h, I don’t know. Middle of the night, vehicle speeding toward a gun battle. Seems like something a cop would find interesting.”

  “What do I do?”r />
  “Do not kill those policemen. Russian mercenaries are one thing, but German cops are another.” Trick pauses, then says, “You’d better prepare for a hot mount.”

  Well, la de da. This is doable but I’ll need some serious uppers. I let the headlights drive closer. It’s a step van like UPS delivery guys drive. When the van is fifty yards away, it slows down a little and edges toward the curb. I turn and run up the road, away from the van. As he pulls up alongside me the van’s driver slows down a bit more, but I still need a giant hit of Madrenaline so I can match his speed. I take three sprinting steps and then desperately leap up and grab the handle on the van’s sliding door as it flies past me.

  The door is open for me, but I still have to fight the wind to swing myself inside. I land on the floor of the van with a loud thud, and my momentum pitches me under the passenger seat. My knees and elbows rattle on the floor as my body reacts to all the Madrenaline. I gulp a few deep breaths and bump a heavy dose of Kalmers to balance out again. All these drugs make my scalp feels like it’s on fire.

  I look up at the Greeter. He’s driving like a maniac but still manages to run his eyes over me and howl, “Whoo-ee! If I knew more girls who could run that fast, I wouldn’t be Lonely Rashid anymore!” I don’t know what he means, but he must, because he laughs uproariously. It’s like I’ve been picked up by Jacques’s Arabian brother. “You’d better hang on,” he shouts as he swerves onto a side road.

  I slide across the floor like a cat at an ice rink. For a moment the van is up on two wheels, maybe only one. I haul myself up into the passenger seat and look out the back windows. The flashing lights are still behind us. Between the screeching tires, the roaring engines, and the whooping sirens, the noise in here is incredible.

  The Greeter is a skinny five feet ten inches and looks like he’s in his late twenties. He’s got the requisite Middle Eastern skin tone (swarthy), hair (bushy), and beard (closely cropped). He smells spicy, kind of like cinnamon. I lean over to him and yell, “Name’s Scarlet. You want any help to ditch the oinkers?”

  “I’m Rashid.” He looks in his rearview, then back at me, and hollers, “We’ll use the Puker. Go to the back of the van, and I’ll open the doors from here. Make sure to grab on to something.”

  Oh, this sounds good.

  The Puker turns out to be a fifty-five-gallon drum half full of crude oil. The drum is mounted on a platform with hinges that allow it to tilt, and there’s a big clear hose leading to the bottom of it. The other end of the clear hose leads to a large air tank bolted to the wall. Next to the air tank is a large green button with the word “Puke” written on it. I pull the lid off the drum and hold on to the air tank’s mounting bracket.

  Rashid shouts back, “Ready?” I turn and give a thumbs-up to his reflection in the rearview mirror. He pushes a button on the dash, and the rear doors pop open. Dazzling light blazes into the van, and the sirens hammer my eardrums. I tilt the barrel so it’s on a forty-five-degree angle out the rear of the van and hit the Puke button. There’s a loud whump! as pressurized air launches the oil out of the drum, right at the cops. The flying blob of slipperiness splashes all over the cars, and both vehicles slide around until they crash off the side of the road. Very satisfying!

  I shut the rear doors and clamber my way to the front of the van. “Hey, that worked great,” I congratulate Rashid.

  He shrugs and says, “I hate tailgaters,” with a smug look on his face. He slows to a less frenetic speed, and we compare notes on our way into central Baghdad.

  “How long have you done this kind of work?” I ask.

  “Quite a while, Miss Scarlet,” he says. “Since before my father died, and that was seven years ago.”

  “Well, Rashid, you certainly make a good first impression.”

  Rashid puffs up, obviously flattered. He stays very self-satisfied the whole way into the city.

  TIME magazine, June 1, 1972

  Another Day, Another Tragedy in Greater Germany’s Persian Province

  BAGHDAD—Café owner Ilan Al-Nisat has a long memory. He remembers a time when sports dominated the conversations in his coffee shop. “I had posters of our best football players all over the walls,” the 65-year-old neighborhood fixture recalls. “My regulars used to sign the pictures of their favorite athletes so they would know which customers to argue with.” His animated expression fades as he continues. “But my children and grandchildren, they talk about other things.”

  Yesterday afternoon, the café hissed with news that German security soldiers had fired into another crowd of protesters. This time, the casualties included 434 wounded and 197 killed, making this last week the province’s bloodiest in five years. Almost every native citizen knows someone who has been injured or killed in the recent violence, particularly in the dense downtown area of Baghdad near the Al-Nisat family home.

  Taking a quick break from the shop’s daily bustle, Mr. Al-Nisat tells of a much different atmosphere than the one he sees now. “People are quieter now. They don’t want to attract attention in such a public place. Besides, most of the things that get talked about here aren’t happy things.”

  Mr. Al-Nisat’s children have known nothing but Germany’s uncompromising “stewardship” of their country. The Germans’ thin excuse that they protect their Middle Eastern provinces from Russia’s avarice doesn’t hold any more water for the natives now than it did back when Ilan was a young man raising his family in the apartments above his café. Across the country—in cafés, at work, and at home—boisterous talk of family and sports has been replaced by hushed, dark conversations of risings and rebellion.

  Another day in Baghdad.

  CHAPTER 14

  SAME NIGHT, 11:30 P.M. ST

  TIGRIS AREA, BAGHDAD, PROVINCE OF PERSIA, GG

  Rashid’s café is tidy, bustling with activity, and reeks of spicy food. Behind the kitchen is an attached garage for delivery vehicles, which is handy for stashing oil-spewing vans and sneaking nineteen-year-old white chicks into the middle of Baghdad. Despite the late hour, there seem to be a dozen of his relatives here. They’re all visiting with one another, and they all talk at once. It’s hard to tell the employees from the customers, but Rashid assures me that they can all be trusted never to have seen me in their lives.

  He leads me through the kitchen and into a small office. One of his female cousins brings us iced tea and a big plate of flatbread with sauce in a bowl. Rashid tears off a hunk of bread, dunks it in the sauce, and pops it in his mouth. I dunk and pop too, but unlike Rashid I then gasp and grope for the iced tea with my eyes watering.

  “Hot?” Rashid asks with a smile.

  I’m too busy chugging my tea to answer. Rashid hands me another piece of bread. “Eat some bread. It’ll absorb the oils on your tongue.” I eat the bread. It helps, a little.

  This café has a long history with the international covert community. Rashid’s father, Ilan, provided an unofficial safe haven for American, Russian, and Chinese agents in exchange for pieces of intel he could use as leverage with Baghdad’s German administrators.

  Ilan saw that the Damen und Herren posted to the Middle East did not exactly represent the Fatherland’s best and brightest. He established an “understanding” with them about the many duty-free items that passed through the café’s big garage door. The local Fritzes gladly took his bribes in exchange for seeing nothing and hearing nothing as long as the smuggling didn’t get out of control.

  Rashid’s family has become more actively involved in the black market since Ilan passed away seven years ago. Rashid inherited the café and expanded it from a sleepy neighborhood coffee bar to a chain of five locations all around Baghdad. Five times the space means five times the tax evasion. Some of his many brothers and cousins run the other shops, but Rashid oversees the whole enterprise, especially the under-the-table business. This work gobbles up all his time, hence the “Lonely Rashid” bit. Rashid remains the sole bachelor in his family, but as the oldest he still commands resp
ect among his siblings. I can’t imagine having such a complicated family life. It was thorny enough growing up in a family of three.

  Still, it’s exciting to visit one of the places my father hung around in when he was away from home. I think of the row of stools at the front counter and imagine Dad settling in there for a coffee and quietly trading bits of information with Rashid’s father. They probably shared late nights in this very office, like Rashid and I are doing now.

  Weird.

  My host is just as surprised as Jacques was when I tell him that I’m here to find out what really happened to my dad. Jacques already knew that Big Bertha was my father, but Rashid didn’t realize it until this moment. He tilts back in his chair and runs his hand through his hair. Then he stands up and walks to a tall filing cabinet in the corner. There’s a thick throw rug under the cabinet. Rashid pulls on the little rug and drags the cabinet out from the corner. He squats down where the rug was and fiddles with something on the floor. He pulls up a square section of flooring and sets it to the side.

  Rashid reaches deep into the square hole in the floor. His muffled voice says, “Your father gave my father something to hold.” His shoulders shift as he rummages around in his subterranean stash. “Ah hah!” he exclaims. He puts something in his shirt pocket, replaces the flooring, and shoves the cabinet back in place.

  Then Lonely Rashid settles back into his chair and slides something across the desk to me. It’s a data pod, a small plastic and metal doodad that stores digital files.

  My teeth press tightly together. I’m scared to touch it. “What is it?”

  Rashid shrugs his shoulders. “My father never looked at what it holds and advised me to do the same.” Rashid’s expression softens, and he quietly continues, “His advice was always good, so I did as he asked. He said Big Bertha had left it with him for safekeeping and that I should give it to the first trustworthy American who came looking for it.”