Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  “Noddy picked on me to bury the head and bones and other pieces. He made me do it by myself, which made me figure that maybe I was a marked man too. They might have used me as a slave laborer till harvest time if I didn't give them too much trouble, then get rid of me. We got a flat in the pickup on the way in to Garberville to get supplies, which is how I got to use the roadside phone to call my pop. If they had seen me, they'd have killed me then for sure. I know where that body is buried and I seen Noddy do it. He ain't going to let me walk out of here with you.”

  Lance had a decision to make. He had been satisfied up to this point with how things were going—saying to himself that even Mike Campbell couldn't have handled things more smoothly and professionally—and he was hoping to extract the kid without bloodshed. In and out without a shot fired, that was what Mike said always to aim for, but that was a hard thing” to achieve. Lance hoped that Noddy would have the good sense not to interfere, but if what the kid said was true, and Lance believed it was, Noddy was not going to continue resting on his ass on the veranda steps while they tried to leave. He could probably radio ahead to someone as well as give chase himself, after picking up some serious weapons to match the MAC-10.

  “Bring over that pickup,” Lance ordered the kid. Noddy put down his shotgun when told to and the second man lifted the revolver from his waistband with two fingers and dropped it at his feet. Lance had them sit in the truck bed with their backs to the driver's cab. He sat on the tailgate, covering them with the submachine gun, and waved to the kid to drive forward. Lance had the kid stop the pickup and go into the trees and fetch his Volvo. When the kid was back behind the wheel of the truck, Lance spelled it out for all of them: “You two stay put while the kid drives. If you try to jump out, you better be fast as greased lightning because I'll be driving right behind you, and some bushes and branches won't be enough to protect you from a stream of .45 bullets from this gun.”

  The two men sat quietly as the pickup bounced over the trail through the woods. Lance stayed close behind. As soon as the pickup was out on the blacktop, the kid speeded up and went too fast for them to jump out. The pickup suddenly slowed at one sharp corner where the side of the road dropped off in a precipice. Lance had to brake the Volvo to avoid hitting the rear of the truck. He was wondering what was happening when he saw the pickup door swing open and the kid try to take a running jump out of it and instead bury himself in the tar surface of the road. The pickup went over the edge. Last thing Lance saw was the surprised look on Noddy's face as he sank out of sight.

  The kid was cut and bleeding, but he had no broken bones. Lance didn't bother to cuss him out since he himself would probably have done something similar under similar circumstances. However, he didn't relax until after he reached the San Francisco airport, bought him a ticket to L.A., called the boy's father to meet him at LAX, and waited to see him on the plane. Then he dialed his home number, used the tone while his recorded announcement answered, and picked up the messages from the answering machine. No name was given with one message, but he recognized Andre Verdoux's New York City number.

  Colonel Matveyeva smoothed her fair hair and looked down to see that her knee-length military skirt was straight before entering the general's office. She knocked and went in. He was sitting behind his desk. He had a big head with short, grizzly hair, and bulbous eyes that ogled her body. Colonel Matveyeva let him enjoy himself by strutting a little before his desk. She saluted. He smiled and waved her to a chair.

  “Comrade Colonel,” he began, “I have been busy, as you can imagine, explaining the circumstances of the heavy losses we took at the forward helicopter assault post in Gul Daoud's territory. Moscow was particularly critical, because only last week I was reporting progress on the runway there and being a bit overly optimistic, it seems. The fact that the three Americans were almost certainly personally involved, as well as supplying the missiles used, makes their capture essential. I managed to keep your name out of the disaster.”

  “Thank you, Comrade General.” She sighed with relief to show him she knew what he had done for her. To have her name tied to a sizable slaughter of Soviet soldiers would mean the end of promotions and a job out on the taiga, steppe, or tundra. She supposed she would be working off this favor to the general on her back for as long as she was posted to his staff. Still, it was worth it.

  “These three American adventurers have teamed up with these Afghan bandits,” the general was saying. “This time there is no way for me to protect you further. You must catch these three men. And Moscow wants them alive.”

  “All escape routes for them to Pakistan have been cut behind them. They used up all the missiles in that attack. It will be only a matter of time before we capture them. If I didn't have to take them alive, I could have eliminated them already.”

  “Moscow will not accept that explanation, Comrade Colonel.”

  “They won't have to accept any explanation. I will deliver those Americans, and Gul Daoud as well.”

  “That would be a glorious day for the Red Army,” the general said, beaming. “But before you start on those endeavors, I hope you are free tonight so I can toast you from our new vodka shipment. Will you come, Yekaterina?”

  She smiled her assent. She never called him by his first name while he still had his uniform on.

  * * *

  The two jet bombers circled as their pilots tried to make visual contact with the village they knew from their maps to be somewhere below. On the ground the Afghan men, women, and children raised their faces to the sky and stood still, knowing that movement could give away their presence. The small houses, made of mud bricks, were not easy to see from the air—something that had preserved them from attack up until this. But now things were different. The planes had come to find them specially and would stay up there circling, beyond the reach of their rifle bullets, until either the pilots found what they were looking for or just dumped their bombs somewhere in pretense of following orders. The people had been warned. Other villages through which the Americans had passed were being bombed.

  The time the three Americans had come through the village, everyone had come to their doorways to see them. Mothers had held up their smaller children and shouted, “Look, look.” The children did not know, of course, what Americans were, except that they looked different from Afghans and that their parents were happy to see them, unlike the Russians. Now the Soviet planes were circling overhead, ready to punish them for helping the Americans. They had been warned but had no place else to go. They had lived all their lives on this mountain slope. This was theirs, not someplace else. They belonged here, no matter what happened. They had to stay. The two Soviet bombers spiraled overhead, like eagles lazily riding an updraft.

  First one plane and then the other broke their circles and pulled away. It seemed like they were leaving, but the Afghans knew better and rushed from their houses dragging the very old and the very young with them before the planes streaked in on their bombing run. Some of the old men and women, perhaps too senile to understand what was happening or else too weary to care anymore, refused to budge from their houses and had to be left behind when their obstructive tactics endangered the entire family. Some small children managed to get lost in the rush and, frightened, ran back to their homes.

  The two jets screamed in, flying low, almost wingtip to wingtip, and tumbled down their load of bombs on the mud-brick houses. The bombs, specially designed for such work, were not charged with high explosives like those used to destroy steel-and-concrete structures, since the mud-brick buildings of Afghan villages were easily knocked down by much less powerful shocks. Thus the bombs could be made into a mixture of incendiary and anti-personnel devices. The initial shock blew the mud-brick walls apart, the flaming chemicals spread over a wide area, scorching through living flesh down to the bone, and the anti-personnel shrapnel ripped through the bodies of those the flames had missed. The Russians had put a lot of thought into some of their dealings with the Afghans.


  More than half the houses in the village were demolished, and the burning chemicals lay in glowing trickles and small puddles on the dusty, unpaved streets. Groans came from those buried out of sight beneath the debris. Burned children screamed for their mothers. Old semicripples hopped around with an agility they had not been capable of for decades as the combusting liquids seared slowly through their muscles and nerves. In the street lay one dead baby, cooked through by the heat like a suckling pig, its eyeballs burst.

  The villagers rushed back to tend the wounded and dying, regardless of the possibility of another attack. But the planes did not come back on a second run. This time the Russians were just sending them a warning.

  Joe Nolan gave two of his first cousins their full costs for two years at college, just handed it to them in cash and said, “You can blow it or start to get yourself educated, whatever you want.” They both picked school. Nolan bought more than a half dozen tombstones and had them erected over the resting places of cousins. He paid dentist, doctor, and hospital bills for others and for one wedding reception, two funerals, and a big Thanksgiving Day bash for everyone even vaguely related to the family, regardless of who was on speaking terms with whom. Car repairs, a leaky house roof, clothes for a kid's First Holy Communion. Joe Nolan took care of everything for everybody—while the money lasted. Now he was nearly broke again.

  Being broke was a common condition for many people these days in the once-booming steel town of Youngstown, Ohio. No one wanted to buy American steel when the government let them import cheaper foreign steel from places where workers were paid less than a dollar an hour. Men who had never been idle in their lives now stood bewildered on street corners and watched yuppies on TV lecture them on “developing new skills” and joining “the service economy.” No one seemed to be asking Awkward questions about what happens when everyone is part of the communications and service industries and no one is making anything anymore. If nothing is being manufactured in the U.S., what is being communicated? If all these people are employed in providing services for other people, where is the cash coming from to provide these services? They saw news footage of Tennessee factory workers doing Japanese exercises and wondered what was coming over the good ol' boys down South. People talked first about the Sunbelt, and now they were talking about the Rustbelt, in which Youngstown was prominently featured. It was almost like one of those mysterious things that killed off ancient civilizations, leaving empty cities intact to slowly smother under layers of dust. Or like those Western ghost towns, except that there everyone picked up and left for a richer mine somewhere else while in Youngstown folks stayed on, unwanted in their hometown and unwelcome elsewhere.

  Joe Nolan's last paycheck from Mike Campbell had been a hundred grand. It hadn't taken long for the problems of his large family to eat up even that amount of cash. He hadn't heard from Mike in some time and didn't know how to contact him. He didn't even know if he ever would hear from Campbell again or maybe tomorrow get two days notice before leaving on a six-week mission. He didn't begrudge his relatives the money they needed and always knew he had their affection and loyalty to fall back on if things went bad for him. People still looked out for one another in the old neighborhoods in Youngstown. It was that kind of place.

  Joe's face was long and sad. He was thin, with fast reflexes. He had very bright blue eyes, long teeth that some people said looked like a dog's, and lifeless brown hair. His father had come north from Kentucky during World War II to work in the steel plants, and he could get real mad if someone called him a hillbilly. His folk were mountain people, and he still had their fighting blood in his veins, if anyone was curious enough to test it. Mostly he was peaceful, having seen enough in Nam for any man's lifetime.

  Like Mike Campbell, he had been in the Green Berets, but unlike Mike, he had not been an officer. After coming back he had gone from job to job, woman to woman, drink to drink… Nothing had quite worked out. Going on missions with Mad Mike had given him a new purpose in life—he was good for something again. And his newfound wealth gave him status in the community, even if there were dark rumors as to how he got the cash. It amused Joe that none of the rumors ever approached the reality of what he did. He was still a badder boy than they even could imagine!

  “Fella in here last night is a bail bondsman down at the courts,” the barkeep at the Bunch o' Shamrock told Joe Nolan when he came in for a beer. “You know what he was saying? It made me think of you, only you weren't here, so I took the guy's number and said you'd call him for sure.” He handed Joe a crumpled piece of paper with a name and number on it. “This fella is looking for a bounty hunter. He'll pay twenty percent of the bail skipped plus your expenses if you catch the guy. If you don't catch him, he pays zip. So if some guy jumped a fifty-thousand-dollar bond and you caught him, you'd collect ten thousand plus what it cost you.”

  Joe grinned. “Soon as I stop being a big spender in this place, you figure it's time I went back to work.”

  “Nolan, I don't know what you do for a living, and believe me, I don't ask. But what I'm talking about now is legal work for big money. It's legal. That means you won't be breaking the law. You heard of the word?”

  “I thought it had something to do with having to pay taxes.”

  “In a place like Youngstown, that's a good complaint to have.”

  And so Joe Nolan became a bounty hunter. The barkeep's judgment was good. Nolan proved to be a natural at the job. It didn't turn out to be such a big-money job as it first sounded, but then, few jobs ever turn out to be as good as they first sound. Mostly the bail jumped was much lower than fifty thousand, and the time it took to trace someone could be counted in weeks instead of days. Also, as a newcomer, Nolan was not given any cushy jobs. There were lots of psychos who had jumped bail for five thou and no one desperate enough to go after them. Joe soon found what he liked to do best.

  “I take an assignment that involves a ten-thousand-dollar bail minimum,” he explained to the barkeep at the Bunch o' Shamrock. “That gives me two thou plus expenses. So even if it takes me three weeks to find the guy, it's not bad. And I figure I have to be lucky every now and then and collar the guy in a matter of hours or a day or two, which really pays off.”

  “Nolan, are you saying you can assault some bum in the street and drag him against his will down to the local jailhouse?”

  “To hell with the local jailhouse. I can do more than any cop can. I can bring him across a state line without extraditing him. There's a law going back to the last century that permits a bounty hunter to subdue and take his prisoner across state lines.”

  “You can hit him over the head?” the barkeep asked, impressed.

  “Only when he won't come quietly,” Joe said.

  Nolan didn't talk about the creeps and weirdos he had to go after. The sane ones who jumped bail vanished. Only the loonies hung around, convinced that once they were no longer behind bars, they were free. The character Nolan was tracking down now qualified in the mad-dog category. Joe was waiting in the bar for a call from a plainclothesman who had a hot tip that the fugitive was in a farmhouse just over the Pennsylvania border. The cops were anxious to cooperate on this one because he had recently evaded capture by kicking the shit out of an off-duty officer in a saloon and stealing his shield and gun. The Youngstown, Ohio, police had their hands tied on the far side of the state line, and they saw Nolan as a quick way to bring back the fugitive without weeks or even months of legal bickering.

  Errol Nelson was a real asshole, with a sheet that listed everything from assault and wife beating to burglary, car theft, and extortion. He was out on a twelve-thousand-dollar bail bond on an armed robbery charge. The owner of the store that had been held up had been murdered since Nelson's release on bail, and now the two other witnesses to the crime, both willing to testify against Nelson, lived in fear for their lives.

  Nolan waited for the call in the Bunch o' Shamrock and sipped on his beers, taking it real easy. He guessed tha
t some of the Youngstown cops, friends of the one who'd gotten beat up in the bar by Nelson, against regulations were maintaining a watch for him across the state line. Nolan asked no questions. The call came. Nelson was in the town of Pulaski in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, a half-hour drive from where he sat. He was driving a red Toyota, the scrapes on its right side making it look as if it had sideswiped something. Nolan had seen his mug shots, a fair-haired farm boy with a crazy look and a Neanderthal brow. He would be armed with the cop's stolen gun, at least. He could also be expected not to want to be taken back to Youngstown.

  It was dark by the time Nolan drove into Pulaski. He found the red Toyota in the parking lot of a closed bank, and for a moment Nolan thought that maybe Nelson was breaking into it, but then he guessed that the car was stolen and that Nelson was putting it out of plain sight. Nolan parked down the street from the lot. After about an hour he saw a lone man get in the Toyota, having come in the back way. The car's headlights flicked on and it started moving. Nolan started his engine, and in the few seconds the Toyota was out of sight behind the bank building, he switched on his lights and drove to meet the Toyota, which stopped at the parking lot exit to yield him the way. Nolan eased his car to a stop in front of the Toyota and yelled at the driver if he knew the road to New Wilmington, another town not far off.

  The Toyota's driver stuck his head out the side window. It was Errol Nelson, all right, or else his twin brother. He yelled back, “Outta my way, shithead!”

  Nolan let him go and scratched the side of his head so Nelson would not get a good look at his face in case he was suspicious. If things had gone well, he would have lured Nelson out of his car. Things hadn't worked that way, just as earlier, when he hadn't seen Nelson approach the car until he was almost to it. Nolan wasn't going to force things—just wait till the right moment came and then step in fast. He could see the Toyota's taillights ahead of him, nearing the edge of town. Even at this early hour the whole place seemed deserted. Then he saw the taillights brighten as Nelson braked and pulled over to the side of the road. The lights went out. Joe waited ten minutes before driving past. The Toyota was outside a tavern. He made a U turn and drove back, parking behind the Toyota. Should he go in or wait outside? Normally he would have gone in. But Nelson was probably carrying a piece and would have friends inside to interfere with Nolan and give him time to use it. Joe decided to wait outside. He got out of the car and walked up and down the roadside.