‘No shit?’ I asked, looking at the last man, who was the smallest of the group. Small, but apparently deadly. ‘I’d like to see that,’ I continued, addressing Andrei, ‘can we set it up? I’m happy to wait.’
‘There you go with the jokes again,’ Andrei said with another chuckle. ‘But I don’t think that we can accommodate you.’
‘Then what do you have in mind?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to sit here enjoying my schvitz, while my boys beat the living shit out of you. And then, when the blood is foaming out of your mouth and pouring out of your ears, when your legs are broken and your balls have been kicked black and blue, when your eyes are so swollen you can’t see and your ribs are so bruised you can’t breathe, you can start telling me your real name, who you work for, and why you’re getting involved in our business.’
‘What if I want to tell you right now?’
Andrei smiled. ‘Do you?’
I waited, as if thinking about the prospect, then shook my head. ‘Not really, no.’
‘Then there is nothing more to discuss, for now at least. Begin,’ he shouted, clapping his hands loudly; at which stage four highly trained killers launched themselves toward me, all intent on seeing who could do me the most harm.
Chapter Five
Mikhail – the taekwondo kicker – was the fastest off the bench, and I barely got my face out of the way in time as he skip-stepped across the tiled floor in the blink of an eye and unleashed a roundhouse kick to my head.
It was only as I was avoiding the kick that I realized I was doing exactly what the guy had wanted me to, directing me into the path of his buddy Nikolai’s big right hand.
I got a hand up to deflect it at the last instant, but it still scraped my jaw and rocked me for a moment – just enough time for Mikhail to slam a kick into my gut and for Vladimir to tackle me from the side.
I crashed down hard onto the tiles, Vladimir trying to wrap me up into a wrestling pin – no doubt so that his friends could then be free to pummel me into little pieces.
But I moved too quickly, securing his arms with my hands and corkscrewing a foot between his legs, using leverage to lift him up and turn him over. I landed on top, delivering a thunderous head butt to Vladimir’s unprotected face.
With a skull that weighed over ten pounds, the sheer force of gravity alone would have made it feel like a bowling ball dropping on him; with the added momentum generated by my body, it was like having a bowling ball thrown down onto him.
The back of his head cracked down onto the tiles and I rolled off the inert body, catching the leg of Mr. Taekwondo as he tried to kick me in the ribs and shooting out my own foot, my hardened heel stamping into the side of his knee. In a real fight, breaking the opponent’s knee joint isn’t as easy as it looks on those YouTube demonstrations; but a hard kick to the right target will still cause all sorts of problems, and Mikhail let out a cry of pain as his leg buckled underneath him.
I was getting to my feet, trying to see the men through the steam, when I felt the heavy impact of Sergei’s body slamming into mine, driving me down once again. He was quicker than Vladimir, and immediately took hold of an arm, swinging his body into a cross positon with my own, pulling my arm straight between his legs and leaning back hard.
It would have been snapped like a twig but – assisted by the running sweat of our bodies – I managed to slip out of his grasp, turning my hip into it and bending my arm. Without pausing to take a breath, I jackhammered a punch up into his exposed balls with my other hand, causing him to release the hold altogether.
A heavy, hard-knuckled fist caught me in the side of the head then, and I knew the boxer had finally found his mark. I flew sideways across the floor, dazed and momentarily out of it; I might even have been fully unconscious for a few moments, I’ll never know. But by the time Mikhail tried to stamp on me, I was awake enough to roll out of the way, only to be pulled back down by Sergei, whose arms wrapped themselves around my head and neck like an anaconda.
He tried to sink in a rear naked choke, one arm around my neck to close off the air and blood supply while the other pressed forward on the back of my head to tighten the hold, but I managed to drop my chin in time, blocking the pressure of his forearm on my throat. Strong as he was though, it felt like he was going to squeeze my jaw right off.
His sweaty, naked body was pressed tight to my back; highly unpleasant, but at least it gave me tactile awareness of where a couple of his vital points were, and a moment later one of my hands had reached behind me and clamped down hard around his testicles, pinching one of them hard between thumb and forefinger, doing my best to rupture it completely.
Sergei started to writhe in pain and let go of the choke; I slipped out further, biting his forearm hard as I moved, and he released it completely. I slammed my head backward into his face, then turned with a reverse elbow into the side of his jaw.
While Sergei lay on the floor, dazed and groaning in pain, I saw another kick incoming from Mikhail and rolled across the room to avoid it, finally managing to come to my feet.
I ducked as a jab whipped toward my face from Nikolai, and I let a shovel hook go into his body; I was aiming for the breadbasket but got a rib instead. A good shot, but hardly a man-stopper; especially for a man who’d been in hundreds of bareknuckle fights.
It took him by surprise though, and I capitalized on it by throwing a left hook toward his jaw. But he was fast and recoiled at the last moment, and then I was blasted across the room by a thrusting side kick from the Taekwondo Kid.
I hit a wall and bounced right off, spinning back only to take a big shot from Nikolai right on the button. I dropped like a sack of shit, ribs in agony from the kick, head fuzzy from the punch.
I felt pressure on my leg then, saw Sergei through the steam taking hold of it and leveraging it underneath his armpit, securing me with his own legs and threatening to break my ankle and tear the Achilles tendon right off.
I immediately reacted, understanding the risk, and dropped my other heel down into his already damaged groin. The sudden pain caused him to release the hold once more, and I leapt away from another swiping kick from Mikhail, taking hold of one of Sergei’s own legs and spinning my body around until I sat on top of him, body facing his feet. And then, clamping his thick, tree-trunk-like leg to my chest, I twisted and fell backwards, using all of my bodyweight against his single leg.
The man cried out in agonizing pain as the knee ruptured and the femur broke in half; I felt a spray of fluid, and turned to see that the bone had torn right through the muscle, a jagged edge of femur sticking right out of a wide-open wound in his thigh, blood running all over him, all over me, all over the floor.
I saw the boxer approaching and kicked out my feet, hitting him in the shins and bringing him down; and as he fell, I grabbed hold of his head and rammed it straight down toward Sergei’s leg.
An instant later, I saw flesh tear as Nikolai’s cheek was impaled on the bloody, exposed femur of Sergei; and then I pulled the head off and rammed it back down, this time bursting the boxer’s eyeball on the jagged bone.
Sergei had passed out from the pain, and Nikolai rolled across the floor, hands on his bloodied, disfigured face, screaming and cursing.
I got back to my feet, facing Mikhail the kicker. Long range was his game, that was where his legs would give him the greatest advantage. I had to get closer, trap him in a range he didn’t like.
I darted forward, but was stopped when a lancing, agonizing pain shot through my shoulder muscle. I screamed out myself, realizing that Vladimir must have recovered, and was now biting through my deltoid with his hideous metal teeth.
I decided to keep going with my plan to cut down the distance between me and Mikhail though and – despite the pain, and Vladimir’s heavy, naked body on my back – I charged toward him with a shout that has half warlike-cry, and half agonized-scream.
The taekwondo expert fired a thrusting front kick toward me as I got the
re but I turned at the last moment, forcing Vladimir to take the impact instead. His teeth loosened and I reached over my head to his neck, dropping to my knees and throwing him over my shoulder in a modified judo seio-nage technique. As he landed in front of me, I dropped a knee down onto his upturned face, then stood up and slammed a heel down onto his skull with all the force I could manage.
I felt the head crack, and I saw the life go out of his eyes; but then I sensed movement behind me and turned to see Mikhail shooting a low round kick toward my leg. I raised my own leg to take the blow on the shin, blocking it Thai-style, and fired a fast finger-jab into his eyes at the same time.
The flick didn’t find the eyeballs, but it hit the lids and caused his upper body to jerk backward in an instinctive response; and as his lower body came forward as a result, I powered through with the top of my foot right into his balls. He dropped to his knees, eyes watering, and I unleashed another kick of my own toward the taekwondo master, knocking him out cold with a roundhouse to the head, my hardened shin slamming into the side of his skull.
I gasped for breath and looked around the room, taking in the gory scene; they weren’t all dead, but they were certainly out of action. I wasn’t too far behind myself though, my naked body covered in blood, bruises and savage bite marks.
I heard the sound of clapping, and I turned to see Andrei still sitting in the same spot, doing just as he’d promised – enjoying his schvitz and watching the fights.
‘Very good, my friend,’ he said. ‘Perhaps one of the most impressive physical displays I’ve ever seen, if I’m going to be completely honest. A shame it will do you no good.’
Through the steam, I saw him touch a button; and in the next instant, the door was thrown open and his armed guards were there, machine pistols aimed right at me.
I sighed.
Wasn’t that typical?
Out of the frying pan, and into the fire.
Chapter Six
‘Ubey ikh,’ Andrei growled at the guards, and I froze as I saw their trigger fingers react to the command.
I was about to leap to the side – not that it would probably have done me much good – when I noticed the barrels moving away from me before erupting, spitting out rounds all over the steam bath. I wasn’t their target after all – Andrei had ordered his men to kill the four fighters that I’d defeated, and the guards blasted away at their bodies on full-auto. The gun-smoke mingled with the steam, and the two men changed their magazines with slick precision before leveling their weapons back on me.
I stared around at the crumpled, bleeding bodies. ‘Not a good loser?’ I asked Andrei with a raised eyebrow.
Andrei chuckled again, still in good humor despite the carnage. ‘What use are they to me if the four of them can’t defeat one single man?’ he asked contemptuously. ‘They are a waste of my time, a waste of my money.’ He gestured to the door. ‘Out,’ he ordered and – with the two Škorpions trained on me – I readily complied.
The guards backed out of the room and moments later I was standing in the foyer outside the steam bath, my body cold now it was out of the furnace of the schvitz. Blood – my own, and others’ – dripped down my skin, onto the floor.
The two guards were a few feet away, and Andrei – pulling a towel around his waist – positioned himself behind me. The bath house owner and the other guy from upstairs were fully dressed now; they’d evidently been sitting down further into the lounge, but were now on their feet, weapons ready.
My own clothes were in a pile on the floor next to me, and I nudged them with my foot, locating the belt.
Andrei let out a burst of Russian, and I could see the looks of surprise on the faces of the people in front of me. The old man who ran the place seemed the most impressed.
‘Amazing,’ he breathed. ‘You really beat them all?’
I shrugged, like it had been nothing.
‘Shut up, Pavel,’ Andrei chided, and the old man nodded his acquiescence, growing silent.
I needed to get to that dagger. But how?
‘Andrei here said he’d suck my dick if I beat them,’ I said, a plan forming. ‘Isn’t that right, Andrei?’ I turned to the tall man behind me and smiled, adding a wink for good measure.
I knew that a man like Andrei wouldn’t take that sort of disrespect; I only hoped that his retribution wouldn’t involve having me shot.
As it happened, he slammed me in the back of the head with his elbow; I dropped to the floor, grabbing my clothes as if for comfort, and then he booted me in the ribs with his bare foot, sending me skittering across the floor.
It couldn’t have worked out better, and I went with the force of the blow, trying to ignore the pain in my already-bruised ribs as I rolled closer to the two armed guards.
I’d snatched up my belt when I’d been knocked down, pulling the dagger as I rolled; I ended up in a fetal position within arm’s reach of the two men, and knew I had to act immediately.
I burst upwards, knowing that the bodies of these guards were blocking me from any shots that could come from the other two men, and punched hard into the throat of the Russian on the right.
The dagger ripped straight through the cartilage of his neck and I pulled it out, blood flying across the tiles as I grabbed the second man’s machine pistol with my left hand, jerking it to one side as I sensed movement behind me. I released a horizontal elbow behind me, which hit Andrei hard on the jaw and sent him crashing down; and then I reversed the motion of my arm and sent the dagger hard into the gunman’s unprotected ribs, four times in the space of a single second. He creased in half and let go his grip on the gun; I left the punch-dagger embedded in his body as I took control of his weapon, firing immediately at the guy who’d been hiding in the shower upstairs.
The double-tap of 9mm rounds hit him in the chest before he’d had a chance to get a single shot off, and I turned the gun to Pavel, whose own gun wavered in indecision.
I shook my head ever so slightly. Don’t do it.
Pavel’s shoulders shrugged as if to say, what can I do? I understood, too – if he survived this, his life wouldn’t be worth living anyway, the Ovcharka would see to that.
And so his finger tightened on the trigger and I blasted him across the floor with another double-tap to the chest, sending him to meet his beloved Oksana in the hereafter.
I turned back to deal with Andrei, only to be met by the fast-moving blade he held in his hand, which swiped straight across my gut, opening me up. It wasn’t deep, but it hurt like a sonofabitch, and it was only a moment later that I realized I’d dropped my gun.
Where the hell had he got the knife from, anyway? Had he hidden it in his towel? But men like Andrei were deceptive, ruthless predators; they had to be, or they wouldn’t last a week in their chosen profession. He probably knew how to conceal a weapon better than I did.
Then I saw that it was my dagger, the one I’d left in the dead body when I’d grabbed the Škorpion, and I felt relieved that he’d slashed me with it and not stabbed me; he must have been used to using a different kind of knife and – in the heat of the moment – had failed to adjust.
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be making the same mistake twice though, and I pulled away from him, circling around the room, Andrei following me as if attached by an invisible elastic band.
I kept looking around for weapons lying on the floor; there were four guns there, and if I could just get my hands on one then Andrei’s dagger wouldn’t do him any good at all.
But I wanted Andrei alive, if I possibly could; I still hadn’t got any answers, and I would hate for this whole thing to have been a waste of time.
Still, if I shot him in the gut, he’d live long enough for me to question him.
But every time I looked down, Andrei made a move toward me with the dagger and I was forced to back off.
He moved in again, and I fended him off with a jabbing front kick to his thigh. He responded quickly, whipping the point of the blade across my shin, and I sta
ggered back; Andrei’s killer instinct drove him forward, in an effort to take advantage of my injury, and he lunged at me with the dagger.
I pulled back out of the way, then jerked forward as he relaxed, punching him square in the face, dazing him.
I followed up, slashing a round kick across the side of his knee, causing his legs to buckle; but when I moved in to deliver another shot to his head, he recovered more quickly than I’d anticipated and thrust the dagger toward my incoming body.
I arched back at the last instant, reacting by clamping my left hand onto the wrist of the hand which held the dagger, fingers of my right hand reaching forward to grip him around the throat.
He responded by grabbing my throat with his other hand, and I was soon regretting allowing him to get so close. He was much bigger than me, and stronger too; as I felt his huge meaty hand clamping around my neck, I understood that my breathing would stop before his.
We stood, locked in battle, for what seemed like an eternity; wrestling with the dagger with one arm, strangling each other with the second, our sweat- and blood-soaked bodies in among the damaged corpses that lay around the floor.
I felt the life going out of me as my vision started to fade, and I realized my grip on his knife arm was going. Pretty soon I was either going to pass out from lack of oxygen, or let go of his arm, which would allow him to stab me.
No, I told myself. No.
Don’t give in.
There was still one last chance.
From our position of tension, locked together like a statue of ancient Greek warriors, I suddenly let go with the hand that was around Andrei’s throat; at the same time, I relaxed the tension on his knife arm. And as the punch-dagger accelerated toward my body, I inserted my other forearm – now free – over his elbow joint, yanking hard down on his upper arm as I pulled in the other direction with the hand that was still secured to his wrist.
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR CONTRACT: Colt Ryder Is Back In His Most Explosive Adventure Yet! Page 8
